COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, October 02, 2010



“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment” Carl Sandberg

43 comments:

  1. The door at the Elephant Bar was shut, discourse disrupted by digital book burning.

    Facts and uncontainable truths, deleted rather than discussed.

    Tyranny of authoritarians, the only way left to the fascist mind.

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  2. Quit pouting doc, it's unbecoming and does no good.

    I blame it all on Obama anyway.

    Besides, I still wondering what Deuce is trying to do with this stream (I haven't had any coffee yet).

    Is it an invitation to an amateur poetry writing contest? Is it poetry itself? Is it some minimalist distillation of all that is wrong with this country and our lives?


    I have the feeling the bar is being set up for some existential enlightment yet I fear I'm missing it's true meaning (if there is such a thing a "an" existentially true meaning.

    Where the hell is Bob whan you need him?


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  3. Oh, that's right, chasing rattlesnakes and rolling dice (or vice versa).


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  4. Just one of my favorites

    If

    If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

    If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
    If you can meet with triumph and disaster
    And treat those two imposters just the same;
    If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
    And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breath a word about your loss;
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

    ~Rudyard Kipling

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  5. If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
    Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;


    That describes me perfectly Mel; except the last line of course.

    (Also, I have to admit I am still in a major funk about Trish's last criticism of me, not that I'm complaining.)

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  6. That describes my behavior during my epic battle with my relatives, Melody. :)

    Though not at all other times.


    You people would all like the Nevada Hotel. You'd all fit in there one way or other. It's sad about you eastern folk. You don't know what you're missing, up here at over 6,000 feet, where there are still real people to be found.

    I see Quirk standing under the low hanging chandelier of horns, as if crowned by antlers, trying to look deified, but making the usual fool of himself, and Melody over by the grand piano, looking hot and lusty in a blue dress. etc etc

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  7. There were some art works at the Nevada Hotel I wasn't able to get to cause of the diners, but they have real depth perception. Done with silver and gold specks and little diamond dealies, a tree in the background for instance really was in the background, and inch or so deeper than the next level of representation. Three or four levels of representation. I'll go back today and get the name of the artist.

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  8. Maybe they stretched that snake skin a little, how do I know. I'll check that out closer too.


    “Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment” Carl Sandberg

    Nay, poetry is the opening of a door, not to be closed again, leading those who look through to see something they never saw before and will never forget.

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  9. Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
    Author: Sir Thomas Browne
    Source: Religio Medici (sec. 16)

    Where o where is the quote of our Bard about poetry when I need it?

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  10. 'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.'

    William Wordsworth


    'A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.'

    Randall Jarrell


    'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'

    T.S.Eliot


    'Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.'

    (To Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written Paradise Lost should write such poor sonnets.)

    Samuel Johnson


    'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.'

    Philip Larkin


    'Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.'

    Percy Bysshe Shelley


    'Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.'

    Robert Frost


    '...nine-tenths of what passes as English poetry is the product of either careerism, or keeping one's hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.'

    Robert Graves


    'Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.'

    T.S.Eliot


    'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

    Adrian Mitchell


    'No man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, in a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?'

    Ezra Pound


    'I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; - poetry; the best words in the best order.'

    S.T.Coleridge


    'Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.'

    e. e. cummings


    'In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.'

    Basho

    (Translated by Lucien Stryk)


    'Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.'

    Ezra Pound


    'Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.'

    Carl Sandburg


    'Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.'

    Matthew Arnold


    'I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.'

    Bob Dylan


    'Poetry fettered fetters the human race.'

    William Blake


    'Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
    Did certain persons die before they sing.'

    S.T.Coleridge


    'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given , the emotion is immediately evoked.'

    T.S.Eliot


    'To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.'

    Ezra Pound


    'Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and su

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  11. 'The poet is the priest of the invisible.'

    Wallace Stevens


    'Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life.'

    Matthew Arnold


    'The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.'

    T.S.Eliot


    'As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly-created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.'

    Philip Larkin


    'I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.'

    Bob Dylan


    'You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.'

    John Keats (in a letter to Shelley 1820)


    'Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.'

    Robert Frost


    'I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.'

    A. E. Housman


    'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.'

    Emily Dickinson


    'There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.'

    Robert Frost


    'Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.'

    Miguel de Cervantes


    'Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.'

    Don Marquis


    'Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'

    Percy Bysshe Shelley (A Defence of Poetry)


    'I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.'

    Kenneth Rexroth


    'Poets aren't very useful. / Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.'

    Ogden Nash


    'I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.'

    Robert Graves


    'Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.'

    Stephen Spender


    'It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.'

    Randall Jarrell


    'Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.'

    Bob Dylan


    'In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.'

    Basho

    (Translated by Lucien Stryk)

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  12. 'The poet is the priest of the invisible.'

    Wallace Stevens


    That's pretty good.

    But, makes nothing happen, Auden

    Breakfast time for bobbo.

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  13. A powet is someone who's been struck by one lightening bolt too many.

    Rufus:

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  14. A powet is an inebriated hillbilly expressing to perfection all things rural.

    anon

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  15. That's a lovely photo, Mel.

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  16. Poetic Understatement of Epic Proportions:

    "Maybe they stretched that snake skin a little, how do I know."

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  18. We Came. We Saw. We Suck.

    Jon Stewart is through buying what Obama is selling.


    Note that President Obama just endorsed Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity." Apparently, Stewart does not feel the need to return any favors.

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  19. “Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment” Carl Sandberg



    I guess some would consider my life poetry.

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  20. Whit wrote:

    "Glad to see the proper decorum being observed! :-)

    Sorry Dr. Hiss is hissing though from my perspective, the atmosphere has been much improved lately.

    knock on wood."


    Well, ya, if you like the sound of a sparsely populated bar. Enjoy your "decorum"!

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  21. Let's leave it to the proprietors; when they want a little "excitement," all they have to do is post something about the "peace" talks, or somesuch, and we'll have a ruckus galore for a day or two.

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  22. Schwarzenegger - Lawmakers reach compromise/solution on California Budget

    This is why I haven't paid that much attention to the "Crack-up in Cali;" the numbers just aren't that large in the context of a Two Trillion Dollar economy.

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  23. I guess some would consider my life poetry.



    No shit.

    Son up 40-50 on blackjack at the Hotel Nevada, wish I could post a pic.

    bobbo up $550 having won the "minor jackpot" on some machine or other. Was down nearly two hundred when the lights lit up.


    You can hide sadness but you can't hide happiness.

    Tomorrow we're driving to some state park with a beautiful lake.

    Then...the big time

    I have already paid for our trip:)

    There are lots of cougars around here, and everybody drives pickups, and the boy scouts called me sir. In Vegas you go a long ways to see a pickup, as I recall.


    Idaho beat Western Michigan 33- something. Basically clobbered 'em.

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  24. No roulette at the Hotel Nevada, a minor flaw in an otherwise wonderful place.

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  25. Poetry to my ears....

    Vegas Suffering Like Never Before

    I'm checking out the condo prices, homes on the market, the Senate race, plus some other stuff, and son wants to check out the drag races. We followed behind a fuel truck from Utah carrying racing fuel headed to Vegas for awhile. NHRA or something.

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  26. Poetry is the written expression of the experience lived when the interface between the brain and the non-locality of the noumenal all is weakened. The brain is a reducing value.

    bobbo

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  27. heh :)

    I guess some would consider my life poetry.


    Poetry.... or Gothic horror.

    Who can know?


    Ingrid Bergman was one of the names on the Hotel Nevada walk of fame.

    Always did like her.

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  28. British ruling establishes religion status for Druids

    LONDON - The ancient pagan tradition of Druidry has been formally accepted as a religion under charity law in Britain - a decision its followers hailed Saturday as giving long-overdue recognition to the worship of spirits and the natural world...

    The Druid Network, a group of about 350 Druids, will receive exemptions from taxes on donations after the semi-governmental Charity Commission granted it the same status as mainstream religions such as the Church of England...



    Although they are best known as the robed, mysterious people who gather every summer solstice at Stonehenge - which predates the Druids - believers say modern Druidry is chiefly concerned with helping practitioners connect with nature and themselves through rituals, dancing and singing at stone circles and other sites throughout the country they view as sacred.



    Let's Hear It For The Druids


    Sounds like a party-down religion. I'm surprised they don't have more adherents.


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  29. According to Blake, the Druids damn near depopulated the British Isles during their human sacrifice phase.

    It's amazing the party down religion has any adherents at all.

    Thinking of giving up the rosy cross for the taste of a little human meat, Quirk?

    yum,yum and fe fi fo fum

    g'nite

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  30. All that gambling excitement I pushed the wrong name button.

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  31. Globalization On The Line

    ...Tensions may take time to subside and so will the questions raised by the episode. If globalisation has indeed created deep interdependence, then how does one explain China raising the ante to a dangerous level with seeming unconcern about the fallout on Japanese trade and investment? Can China ignore the impacts of decreasing Japanese FDI and reduced imports of Chinese goods? Japanese businesses were clearly rattled and pleaded for a peaceful resolution. The informal ban on the export of rare earth material to Japan in the past week alarmed manufacturers from hybrid automobile maker Toyota to electronic and other green technology companies relying on rare earth (92 per cent of its supply coming from China) to manufacture a whole host of export products. Preoccupied with its effort to restart its economic growth engine, Japan can ill afford to suffer setbacks such as those brought on by a confrontation with China.

    The question is, why do global integration and interdependence not lead China to feel similar constraint? How can it ratchet up the dispute without worry about the consequences for its economy? The answer seems to lie in the asymmetric interdependence. China, flush with its $2.5 trillion reserves and still growing at 8 per cent, can risk taking a few knocks more than Japan's ageing and debt-laden economy. At a time of political transition, Chinese leaders' need to appear strong in defending the country's territorial claims. They also need to mind the rising anti-Japanese sentiment of China's internet-savvy youth...




    Global Trade Wars?

    The concept of 'Face' is very important in the Far East and China went out of their way to assure that Japan was given no chance to save face in their dispute.

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  32. According to Blake, the Druids damn near depopulated the British Isles during their human sacrifice phase.


    I assume you are kidding.

    With regard to the switching, I always been fascinated with Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. Fires on the hilltop, Egdon Heath. Eustacia was hot.

    I'm not complaining. The Rosy
    Cross has been very good to me. Secret knowledge is cool; but heck, fires on the hilltops on Midsummer's Eve, sacred groves, dancing, singing, other stuff.

    What's not to like?

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  33. Nope, Not Kidding

    From that we get "According to Blake, the Druids damn near depopulated the British Isles during their human sacrifice phase."

    Which Blake? Blake Edwards?


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  34. Druidism would seem to be a perfect fit for those that take the horoscope half seriously. The fatality of the stars, the worship of nature, which is nothing but red in tooth and claw. Consider the fishes of the sea, how they neither weave nor sow, only eat one another. The big eat the little, and the little better be fast, and smart, which is the hindu image for nature from time out of mind. Some of the human race--somehow--has gotten beyond all this, but druidism, the horoscope, human sacrifice, the fishes of the sea, the wolves and the elk, all part and parcel of the same circular outlook. All this worship of nature is at bottom a bunch of bunk. But Christ walked on the waters of chaos, as is reported.

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  36. And The Great Bobbo floats in a sea of bushwa.


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  37. Very true, this really conveys how fragmentary poetry can be, how we're only afforded what the writer wants us to see!

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