Bonjour Monsieur Gustave
There is so much ‘Now’ being written, and somehow I want to find the shortest way to, that elusive Eldorado-ish, ‘Now’. Mind you, I do seem to be doing it by going through Dostoyevsky and Joyce, and Duchamp and Goya, and others (Zola’s Nana and the wonderfully syphilitic Maupassant), but I excuse myself by telling myself that they were eons ahead of their time, and some of their drivers were akin to mine, my precious HIV (One disease to rule them all, etcetera, etcetera). I recognize these titans as tripping-up points too, and hope that if I was to pass them on the street, or down the old boreen (Boreen: Gaelic for muddy old country lane), I would take a chainsaw to them, as recommended by the Buddha himself. Ditto Mr. Courbet, as in ‘Good Morrow Gustave’. Thankfully it all eventually should fit in the cannon, or canon, take your pick (TYP), at last to be shot out, or shat out (TYP), and might, hopefully (some hope), end up in those bastions designed to hold those sorts of things, those museumy places. But now you can just plonk them there yourself, utilizing the divinely appointed Photoshop and, before you know it, James is your abusive uncle, or Bob, or somesuch.
The miracle of ‘Now’ is something else indeed. All the self-help books say you should get there, at least if you want to achieve Nirvana. And who doesn’t, to be sure, to be sure?
Did you ever think of just strangling Cleo? I bet you did. I even suspect you have murdered her a thousand times already, or more. But I also suspect she fights back. Those O’Ptolemies, I swear.
Yes, I see that particular type of Irish brutality in yer man’s face. It is very close to home, uncomfortably so. There’s a certain ‘Peaky Blinders’ there too, the sort of brutality gestated over generations as a result of being totally brutalized yourself/himself/ourselves. I let my American spelling keyboard change brutalised to that other spelling. I allow that happen, on and off, as it wants to, if I can’t be bothered to check it. I was pretty mid-Atlantic anyway, crossing back and forth with the other fecking Geese, so what schticks sticks. I have more or less decided to let it do what it wants. One might as well get to the ‘nowness’ of it all and embrace LOL and TYP, and just get on with it. I suspect misspelling and no punctuation might be the way to go.
You must register that resentment at this historic brutalizing, being a Sassenach (Sassenach: Those English geezers what dun us in for over 400 years) there, in the wild-west of that green patch, down that ol’ bog road on this blessed St. Paddy’s Eve. I certainly felt the difference being a ‘Paddy’ when I first arrived in London, before I manufactured my posh English plumminess. It didn’t help that it was the same time that the IRA were doing their damndest to disrupt any attempts at ‘passing’, like they even knew of my existence. It also didn’t help that, as an usher at the 'National Theatre' (before the 'Royal' was added to the name), I had to search pundit’s bags for bombs. “Suren’ ye wouldn’t be of-a-trying to smuggle explosives into de teatre, at all, at all, now would ye me old sagosha (Sagosha: patronizing Oirish term of endearment, roughly equivalent to the English ‘my good fellow’), to be sure, to be sure?” It took weeks of concentrated effort to reconstruct the ‘Th’ sound alone; the rest was all about learning to not sound so bloody apologetic.
Of course, I dabbled in the Perecs, the Guattaris, the Foucaults, the Deleuzes, the Kristevas (French geezers who wrote semiotic poop in the 70s, basically just here to prove that I was once semi-smart, or at least pretended to be), but remember none of it, other than ‘Discipline and Punish’, which did at least lead me towards some new realisations; that idea that the streets were cleaned up for trade, that madhouses were created for the undesirables who might clutter, or have been unsightly on, those money-generating arteries, the removal of that living and proliferating plaque. Nothing, of course, has changed since then, spendooley being spendooley, at least other than the fact that I became newly, or more, stupid. I would now file them all under the ‘unreadables’, happily so, I might add. Then there was so much pretence and so little time. Now there’s even less time, thankfully, so ‘Now’ it is, misspellings and ‘LOL’ included, and all that new pretence. All the same, it was good to know where ‘The Bedlam’ had come from, at least initially.
I do be having education envy; that “He was a Cambridge man, of course”, rankles. I would have happily strangled ‘Jude the Obscure’ to take his place, sort all that shit out, and get a good education. I would also have greedily eaten all his children, and their nappies/diapers (Wild Goosing there to be Trans-Atlantically understood), to get there. But when all is said and done I will just have to twaddle along with “He was a ‘NELP’ man, of course”, even though NELP transmogrified into that glorious seat of learning, ‘The University of East London’.
I know you have seen the image before and ‘favoured’ it, liked it, starred it, gave it a big dolloping red heart, raised my hopes even, but I am sending it to you again here. It records the moment just before I took a chainsaw to Mr Courbet down that old French boreen. It, that trusty chainsaw, was in the black bag at me mateses feetses (Smeagol talk for friend’s feet).
The notes here are in brackets beside the words they are explaining. In the original Word document they are numbered and added as notes at the end of each page, just like in a proper book.
Can I have an Amen (CIHAA) up here?
Bonjour Monsieur Gustave
There is so much ‘Now’ being written, and somehow I want to find the shortest way to, that elusive Eldorado-ish, ‘Now’. Mind you, I do seem to be doing it by going through Dostoyevsky and Joyce, and Duchamp and Goya, and others (Zola’s Nana and the wonderfully syphilitic Maupassant), but I excuse myself by telling myself that they were eons ahead of their time, and some of their drivers were akin to mine, my precious HIV (One disease to rule them all, etcetera, etcetera). I recognize these titans as tripping-up points too, and hope that if I was to pass them on the street, or down the old boreen (Boreen: Gaelic for muddy old country lane), I would take a chainsaw to them, as recommended by the Buddha himself. Ditto Mr. Courbet, as in ‘Good Morrow Gustave’. Thankfully it all eventually should fit in the cannon, or canon, take your pick (TYP), at last to be shot out, or shat out (TYP), and might, hopefully (some hope), end up in those bastions designed to hold those sorts of things, those museumy places. But now you can just plonk them there yourself, utilizing the divinely appointed Photoshop and, before you know it, James is your abusive uncle, or Bob, or somesuch.
The miracle of ‘Now’ is something else indeed. All the self-help books say you should get there, at least if you want to achieve Nirvana. And who doesn’t, to be sure, to be sure?
Did you ever think of just strangling Cleo? I bet you did. I even suspect you have murdered her a thousand times already, or more. But I also suspect she fights back. Those O’Ptolemies, I swear.
Yes, I see that particular type of Irish brutality in yer man’s face. It is very close to home, uncomfortably so. There’s a certain ‘Peaky Blinders’ there too, the sort of brutality gestated over generations as a result of being totally brutalized yourself/himself/ourselves. I let my American spelling keyboard change brutalised to that other spelling. I allow that happen, on and off, as it wants to, if I can’t be bothered to check it. I was pretty mid-Atlantic anyway, crossing back and forth with the other fecking Geese, so what schticks sticks. I have more or less decided to let it do what it wants. One might as well get to the ‘nowness’ of it all and embrace LOL and TYP, and just get on with it. I suspect misspelling and no punctuation might be the way to go.
You must register that resentment at this historic brutalizing, being a Sassenach (Sassenach: Those English geezers what dun us in for over 400 years) there, in the wild-west of that green patch, down that ol’ bog road on this blessed St. Paddy’s Eve. I certainly felt the difference being a ‘Paddy’ when I first arrived in London, before I manufactured my posh English plumminess. It didn’t help that it was the same time that the IRA were doing their damndest to disrupt any attempts at ‘passing’, like they even knew of my existence. It also didn’t help that, as an usher at the 'National Theatre' (before the 'Royal' was added to the name), I had to search pundit’s bags for bombs. “Suren’ ye wouldn’t be of-a-trying to smuggle explosives into de teatre, at all, at all, now would ye me old sagosha (Sagosha: patronizing Oirish term of endearment, roughly equivalent to the English ‘my good fellow’), to be sure, to be sure?” It took weeks of concentrated effort to reconstruct the ‘Th’ sound alone; the rest was all about learning to not sound so bloody apologetic.
Of course, I dabbled in the Perecs, the Guattaris, the Foucaults, the Deleuzes, the Kristevas (French geezers who wrote semiotic poop in the 70s, basically just here to prove that I was once semi-smart, or at least pretended to be), but remember none of it, other than ‘Discipline and Punish’, which did at least lead me towards some new realisations; that idea that the streets were cleaned up for trade, that madhouses were created for the undesirables who might clutter, or have been unsightly on, those money-generating arteries, the removal of that living and proliferating plaque. Nothing, of course, has changed since then, spendooley being spendooley, at least other than the fact that I became newly, or more, stupid. I would now file them all under the ‘unreadables’, happily so, I might add. Then there was so much pretence and so little time. Now there’s even less time, thankfully, so ‘Now’ it is, misspellings and ‘LOL’ included, and all that new pretence. All the same, it was good to know where ‘The Bedlam’ had come from, at least initially.
I do be having education envy; that “He was a Cambridge man, of course”, rankles. I would have happily strangled ‘Jude the Obscure’ to take his place, sort all that shit out, and get a good education. I would also have greedily eaten all his children, and their nappies/diapers (Wild Goosing there to be Trans-Atlantically understood), to get there. But when all is said and done I will just have to twaddle along with “He was a ‘NELP’ man, of course”, even though NELP transmogrified into that glorious seat of learning, ‘The University of East London’.
I know you have seen the image before and ‘favoured’ it, liked it, starred it, gave it a big dolloping red heart, raised my hopes even, but I am sending it to you again here. It records the moment just before I took a chainsaw to Mr Courbet down that old French boreen. It, that trusty chainsaw, was in the black bag at me mateses feetses (Smeagol talk for friend’s feet).
The notes here are in brackets beside the words they are explaining. In the original Word document they are numbered and added as notes at the end of each page, just like in a proper book.
Can I have an Amen (CIHAA) up here?