I have spent my life accommodating other people's wishes. I've decided that I'm tired of it, it being the half-assed job I've being pulling the last ten years or so trying to play both hands, mine and everyone's expectations, wishes, plans.
I'm in love, but I'm tired of compromising. So there it stands. We shall see. "Don't let me down," etc.
I seem to possess (and always have) a very keen sense, or awareness, of people that I love -- their thoughts, outlooks, moods, tastes, personalities, etc, etal. I know them, more often than not, better than they know themselves.
So why or how is it that no one ever really knows me?
regarding an entirely new (at least for me) way of (making) art -- a topic I've been thinking about for awhile now. More anon.
I was just so struck (again) by how random life is -- one "dates" another for a period of time, a daily evaluation of another person for a prescribed amount of time, and then, one morning, one wakes up and puts on a fancy set of clothes and commits one's life to another person. One could equally and easily be run over by a bus. How does anyone make this choice? Is it just hedging bets? Does anyone really feel anything?
(How un-metaphysical of me to post!)
Thus far (in no particular order):
Jeffrey Eugenides, "Middlesex"
Jack Holland, "Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice"
Michelle Mercer, "Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period"
Peter Carey, "Theft" (re-read)
Tony Earley, "Somehow Form a Family", "Here We Are In Paradise" (re-read), and next "Jim the Boy" in preparation for "The Blue Star"
David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" ("Infinite Jest" is on deck)
Sandor Marai, "Casanova in Bolzano" (re-read for the 5th time)
Katie Roiphe, "Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages"
Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination"
Lewis Hyde, "The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World"
Henry Beston, "The Outermost House"
David Mitchell, "Cloud Atlas"
Gail Levin, "Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography"
Jed Perl, "New Art City"
Elaine Scarry, "On Beauty and Being Just" and "Dreaming by the Book"
Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"
Nick McDonell, "An Expensive Education"
David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
Naguib Mahfouz, "Palace Walk"
Nancy Milford, "Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna Saint Vincent Millay"
Sarah Thornton, "Seven Days in the Art World"
Neil MacFarquhar, "The Media Relations Department of Hizb'allah Wishes You A Happy Birthday"
Plus a fun English novel that I'm blanking on the name of, as well as, of course, the usual roster of poets and prose writers that form my pantheon (Rilke, Emerson, Whitman, Sontag, Wright, & everyone involved with "The New Yorker" and newyorker.com.)
Will update when the summer's actually drawn to a close.
Strange to feel so emotionally spent & approaching void and yet artistically alive. Different levels of artistry? My current work isn't inspired as it was when I first fell, but it seems to be trumping, quality-wise, everything else, even though my interests haven't changed much. This is a new phenomenon. Everything is new, but in an old, familiar way.
Does this mean I'm evolving?
Appropriation is only worthwhile if you have something new to bring. This is why most contemporary, ironic, "meta", postmodern art is total shit.
That said, I'm sure my saying it is somehow postmodern, or at the very least, rather dull. I just haven't read enough to know that I'm appropriating someone's criticism. I'm just listening to the differences on "River: The Joni Letters" and "A Tribute to Joni Mitchell" which, so far, make me hate/appreciate Norah Jones less/more and admire Sufjan Stevens in a new way, ie confirming the originality of his ear.
Everything and everyone in this world is having an existential crisis in light of omniscient truths! America, America, America! Leading the way as always.
(Including me.) (As always.)
Once upon a time I would write for hours about it, but these days, "it's all too much for me to take."
What will it take? When does it stop? When does it start? And where to begin?
To the Sun, To the RisenFor now you are stilljust a word, butthe time is not farwhen you will namelesslyunperceivedshine onceagainSo the visionary is whatever isself evidente.g.I am voyaging around the sun for nowReturn me to, returnto methe still gold-litplaceof your peacestill gold-litspaceI have quieted my soul like a weaned childAnd permit my small translation to nothing at last- Franz Wright
Because who doesn't need an excuse to excuse one's self from a conversation, a situation, a moment, a life -- a reason that is not predicated on one's own need for reflection, realignment, musing, basking, setting it all within the context of the endless mirror of eternity. Or just listening to the wind move through fir trees and watching the moon. [For that's not really (sadly) socially acceptable, now is it. Or maybe it is.]
"I am alive today, those words were spoken, and that happened. I am alive today."
Transmission mostly fixed, maybe. Oil (old and new) mixed afresh. Fuel: note -- need to find.
Very large mountains. Or it'll just keep rusting.
The road out is unpaved.
How one can fall in love, again and again and again, with a song, an album, a painting, a phrase, and yet one's eros for another human is unsustainable even if it's not on repeat and constant.
Is the answer, then, as humans, to be eternal in everything one does?
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
It's all right, it's all right.
"I held on for so long, dusty quaint old song. Things attach with glue. Live and die and gone. June flowers are so bold on the devil's paintbrush road, The devil paints a double life, and there I dare not go. Live and die and gone, live and die and gone. The devil paints a double life, live and die and gone. All or nothing now might as well be true. Leave the dream of hearth and home, that never will come true. Live and die and gone, live and die and gone. Leave the dream of hearth and home, live and die and gone. Sweet wild road ahead, sweet wild road ahead. If I lied and said that all was well, I might as well be dead. Single I was born and single I will die. I'll marry myself to the whole wide world and never make her cry. Live and die and gone, live and die and gone. I'll marry myself to the whole wide world, live and die and gone."
A reflection from the past on the zeitgeist, with, as a bonus, a premonitory nod to hip-hop.
Oh, how the pipers are being paid.
Apt, I thought.
[Clarinets, big brass bass, picolos: see note at Consolidated Debt Obligations.]
Lament
To whom, heart, would you lament? Ever more avoided
your path struggles through incomprehensible
humankind. The more in vain perhaps
since it holds to the course,
hold the course toward the future,
toward the lost.
Once before. You lamented? What was it? A fallen
berry of jubilation, unripe.
But now my tree of jubilation breaks,
my slow jubilation tree
breaks in the storm.
Loveliest thing in my invisible
landscape, you that made me more easily seen
by angels, themselves invisible.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, July 1914.
Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
I will cast off all wishes, all other links,
accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better
it live in the terror of its stars than
seemingly protected, soothed by something near.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, early 1913
"My "I" is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane me, critics, correct them -- but their sanity is parasitic on the creative faculty of genius." -- Susan Sontag, journal, 12/31/57
Beginning of November
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America twenty dollars and forty-five cents October 29, 2008.
...
America vote Barack Obama.
America your existence as you've known it comes down to this.
America I can't stand this the plumbers and the racists and the friends and the marxists and the terror of the terror shit the man shared his PB&J why is this so frightening the man is troubled by his own spectacular common sense
America this is the impression that I get from looking at the internet set.
America is this correct?
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Heart's swing. O so securely fastened
to what invisible bough? Who, who gave you that push,
so that you swung me up into the leaves?
How close I was to the fruit, delectable. But not-to-remain
is this momentum's essence. Only the closeness, only
to the ever-too-high suddenly the possible
closeness. Proximities — and then
from the irresistibly swung-up-to place
sure to be lost again, the new view, the prospect.
And now: the commanded reverse
back and across, out into equilibrium's arms. Below,
in between, the hesitation, the force of earth, the passage
through the will of gravity—, on past: and the sling pulls taught,
weighted by the curiosity of the heart,
upward into that other opposite.
Again, how different, how new! How they envy each other
at the ends of the rope, these halves of delight!
Quarters, only quarters . . . for there above
the upper half-circle remains, that segment of the heavens
undisturbed, unbegun—, and even for the boldest
closed: would he not plunge headfirst from the barred pathway?
But how should we not, since we do owe everything
to it, to the utterly unforeseeable
strength of the push, have faith in that
greater push that flings us up into the round?
For what swings toward us from there is no mere reflection
(it would cease at our apex) of these earthly arcs:
no, one day we'll complete ourselves through the tautness in space.
To tauten it, that's the key. To stretch it taut between the ends
of the rounding, ever-reversing strength
— Rainer Maria Rilke
The goodly editors of Paper Monument have got their fingers on the button. Bravo!
It was said that Mr. LeWitt didn’t like vacations. His pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a vacation from it?
To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”
Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt’s retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: “He didn’t dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the inconclusiveness of logic.”
He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”
He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”
"For me, and I think this is different for all artists, I can have as much control as I want to have. But the minute I start controlling it too much, it stops making sense. I don’t want that mark-by-mark control. I want a certain amount...and then I want to let go of it. And I’m not talking about happy accidents. That’s not like what really happens in the work. If I let something just slide off, it’s not something that I’m not seeing. I see every little inch of it. It’s all about getting what I intend and what my head and my emotions want and what my arm does. And letting my arm do things that I think I don’t know about. ... When everything is going well and I’m completely involved in it, I couldn’t tell you what I’m thinking about. If I get stuck in something, it’s frustration, anger. Or, it’s like stream of consciousness, the chatter, chatter, chatter of the mind. ... You’re posing problems for yourself. It’s kind of like a battle of you against you, and you are trying to figure it out. And that’s when it gets painful, when it’s not coming together. And I have no idea how I am going to bring it together. It starts to feel like a mess. Like, I’ll think I have it and I’ll change one color and instead of it being the solution it becomes this big mess." - Elizabeth Murray
The ferocious, incisive glee with which Mr. Kuspit unleashes himself in this review is truly breathtaking. And was deeply enjoyed by this writer. Tip of the hat.
"... It also seems inevitable that when, almost a century ago, the most prestigious communities concerned with the fine arts dedicated themselves to drastic projects of innovation, beauty would turn up on the front line of notions to be discredited. Beauty could not but appear a conservative standard to the makers and the proclaimers of the new; Gertrude Stein said that to call a work of art beautiful means that it is dead. Beautiful has come to mean "merely" beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment.
Elsewhere, beauty still reigns, irrepressible. (How could it not?) When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying, "Nobody of any real culture ... ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned," sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered. Les beaux arts, when summoned to a similar call to be up to date, did not. The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art." Excerpted from Susan Sontag's essay "An Argument About Beauty".
If most men lead lives of quiet desperation, riddle me this:
What lives do most women lead?
Thank you, Glenn Gould.
Tell me why, tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell?
Yes, only love can break your heart.
When nothing makes any sense, you got a reason to cry.
Looking for an ocean.
An iceberg in Alsek Lake, Alaska.
"This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.
When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO2 dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.
Today, with CO2 levels at three hundred and eighty-five parts per million, the disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the nineteen-fifties, is melting at an annual rate of twenty-four thousand square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year. Over the past ten years, forests covering a hundred and fifty million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations. It is believed that rising temperatures are contributing to the growing number of international refugees—“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said recently—and to armed conflict: some experts see a link between the fighting in Darfur, which has claimed as many as three hundred thousand lives, and changes in rainfall patterns in equatorial Africa."
Excerpted from Elizabeth Kolbert's essay, "The Island in the Wind: A Danish community's victory over carbon emissions", The New Yorker, 7 July 2008.
Deep in the heart of the St. Elias Range, home to Canada's largest mountains, roughly 30 miles north of the U.S.-Canadian border, sits the Tweedsmuir Glacier, one of hundreds in the region that have been melting these last few decades. In the last nine months, however, it has begun to surge into the Alsek -- a wide, rapid river which flows from Yukon territory through Alaska into the Pacific Ocean -- routinely calving chunks of ice the size of a three story building. I was there exactly 14 days ago, listening to the Tweedsmuir create mini-tsunamis roughly every half hour as it dropped its ice cubes into the river. The glacier is melting and surging so fast -- because the rubble on which it sits has warmed enough to make the glacier's traction slippery -- that it has most likely dammed the river since that time. The pilot who helicopter portaged us around Turnback Canyon (pictured below) said he'd flow over it four days before meeting us at our campsite. In that time -- mere days -- he noticed a substantial shift, and predicted that by the following week (roughly 25 July) the Alsek would be fully blocked by ice.
The Tweedsmuir Glacier in November 2007, looking West-Southwest. The Alsek is located towards the bottom of the photograph.
In April 2008. Looking West. Note how the Alsek splits into two forks. In the picture below, our camp location was situated on the bottom right corner, on the opposite (north east) bank of the river, before the gravel / morain spit divides the river.
In May 2008, looking Northwest.
And in July 2008:
Incredible to witness. And at the same time also unspeakably infuriating, terrifying, and paralyzing.
This is a gift horse we are all inheriting, The slightest glimpse confirms what we already know -- just how rotten the horse's teeth are. The time for change was thirty years ago. Now it's time for radical surgical intervention.
"The artist should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it. ... The artist has only to remain true to his dream and ... must see naught but the vision beyond. ... [describing the quest for that vision, he said] Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing." --Albert Pinkham Ryder
"I don't understand about diamonds, and why men buy them..
What's so impressive about a diamond, except for the mining?"
Cause I've seen some hot, hot blazes
Come down to smoke and ash...
DJ's RD.
I was just thinking about human experience (I've been reading Romantic poets all day) and was reminded by James Wood's piece in the New Yorker this week about suffering of that time when I walked into Mexico. I passed through a gate in Laredo, traveling across a bridge over the Rio Grande/Bravo with my bag slung across my back, and reached another gate, in which there was a turnstile. I dropped in a quarter into the slot, and circled through. An officer with a very large automatic rifle greeted me. "Welcome to Mexico." This all occurred in two minutes' time.
I found myself a cab eventually, after discerning (though I was wary) that I did not, in fact, need a transit visa, and as I looked out at the scenery passing by en route to the bus station, I realized anew how absurd borderlines -- along with their inherent implications and intentions of dividing people, thereby denigrating or denying them agency -- were in their arbitrariness. A person is a person. We all suffer. We all feel joy. We all die.
In other news, I have much to report. I'm only just beginning to digest the last month of travel. But expect updates in due time.
The World of the Senses
What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.
Now this, the
dreaming breathing body
lying right beside
my own, just think—
at any given instant
it might undergo a change so
enormous that nothing is left of it
but mere object, a thing
to be taken away from me, never
to be seen again, never.
- Franz Wright
There are no religio-spiritual beggar pilgrims in America.
Hm.
From the introduction to this year's Whitney Biennial:
"While numerous works demonstrate an explicit or implicit engagement with art history, particularly the legacy of modernism, as well as a pronounced interest in questioning the staging and display of art, others chart the topography and architecture of the decentralized American city and take inspiration from postindustrial landscapes and urban decay. Using humble or austere materials or employing calculated messiness or modes of deconstruction, they present works distinguished by their poetic sensibility as they discover pockets of beauty in sometimes unexpected places. ...
Across media, much work in this year’s Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times."
Yes, onward to the revolution, but nonetheless: I feel somehow vindicated by this.
I have seen the best minds of my generation “choosing” being forced into corporations, making millions of dollars at 24.
I have seen the best minds of my generation paying their rent with their credit cards.
I have myself withdrawn entirely from society. And lived right at the source of its pulsing heart.
What is the answer already? Begs,
Isn’t there another, third way? Begs,
Why can’t human societies transcend this situation finally?
Sounds of the steaming thought train echo deep into recesses.
Pacing back and forth between Empire and Liberty;
[At least Liberty is blessed by Agency]
Waiting for Godot?
On va voir. On va voir, toujours.
Tous les jours!
And I recall
everything,
everything's
here ---
what is time? When
is the present?
I'm still here alone in the night hours with everyone.
And everything that once was
infinitely far
and unsayable is now
unsayable
and right here in this room.
- Excerpted from "Progress", by Franz Wright.
The Autonomous Circles!
Especially when they overlap. Especially where they overlap. Especially where they don't.
Patience. Peace. Joy.
Gardenias.
"I still, in presence of life ... have reactions -- as many as possible. ... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions -- appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing -- and I do. I believe I shall do yet again -- it is still an act of life." - Henry James, to Henry Adams.
Wheeling Motel
The vast waters flow past its back yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette's on the marquee
A block down. It's twenty five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.
There's this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.
The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.
Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.
- Franz Wright.
I have found my torrid current. And oh, how the river is broad.
"The impalpable sustenance of me that comes from all things, at all hours of the day".
Bless you, Whitman.
I am absolutely overwhelmed by gratitude.
Amen.
I stripped it all back down to the true essence of things, the essence of being, finally and
I AM ALIVE AGAIN.
And thus beginneth the thriving.
Breath, eyes, memory, eyes, eyes, eyes, taste, touch, wish, thought, desire
and I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.
"At present I am a sojourner in civilised life again."
-Thoreau.
I think of Thoreau every day, particularly since I'm in the midst of re-reading Walden in conjunction with a book on his philosophies entitled "A Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism". How appropriate, then, that he should come up as a topic in the New Yorker a few weeks back. [Note: my parsing of this is as yet unfinished, and I also need to correct the blurred lines between Lepore's, Thoreau's and my passages. It's so very indiscriminate. It was published when still in draft form, and I can't undo it now.]
"“Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.""
"Sellers’s paradigm seemed to offer an answer; he had dumped all the pieces out of the box, and put them together, joining decades of meticulous empirical research about Western farmers, Eastern bankers, Southern slaves, artisans, immigrants, politicians, everyone.
"Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely. “Inherent and ongoing contradictions between capitalist market relations and human needs” plagued the nation, as Sellers had it, and plague us still."
I don't disagree with this. Actually, I believe it, or want to fervently. I do, mostly because it suits my nature, my world view, and a large chunk of my experience. And to be quite honest I like having my tendencies defended (well, shucks, I might as well be honest, shaint I.. isn't this whole racket of the online presence about that.. but mostly for me I think it is a way to defend myself, because I'm perpetually attacked from all sides for my "behavior."
"His experiment was, of course, not a business but an anti-business; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on twenty-seven cents a week. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans, and realized a profit of eight dollars and seventy-one and a half cents. “I was determined to know beans,” he writes in a particularly beautiful and elegiac chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only six weeks of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading, writing, hoeing beans, picking huckleberries, and listening to bullfrogs trumping, hawks screaming, and whip-poor-wills singing vespers. “Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one reviewer commented, after “Walden” was published, in 1854. But Thoreau wasn’t so much battling the market revolution as dodging it, “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.” ...
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” Thoreau demanded. One question woke him up every morning, as regularly as the screech of the whistle of the Fitchburg locomotive that chugged by his cabin, on tracks built just up the hill from Walden Pond: Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? In truth, no. “They are but improved means to an unimproved end."
Howe, quoting Samuel Morse quoting Scripture (Numbers 23:23), asks more or less the same question: “What hath God wrought”? Howe’s debate with Sellers is provocative and important because the answer to this question ought to explain, or at least illuminate, the historical relationship between capitalism and democracy. The so-called consensus historians of the nineteen-forties and fifties argued that the seeds of capitalism “came in the first ships” and were planted on American soil by the earliest Colonial settlers. With this, Sellers and Howe disagree, but differently. For Sellers, capitalism is the imported kudzu strangling the native pine of democracy. For Howe, capitalism is more like compost, feeding the soil where democracy grows."
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/29/071029crbo_books_lepore?printable=true
Ach, the dichotomies of life overwhelm me.
Now that I have adopted the urbanity, I long again for the thoughts of raising cows and chickens and hogs and horses.
Wait. I never stopped wanting that.
Oh dear. Oh, oh dear.
TENNESSEE
?
......exhale now.
I am homeless no longer.