Height of stupidity

[Mark Trail , October 11, 2016.]

Mark Trail has come to an uninhabited island to meet up with the USDA’s Abbey Powell and look for red imported fire ants. Mark has come by helicopter. His pilot, Theodore “TC” Calvin, is waiting now on this very island. From the September 26 strip:

“Look, Mark, I brought you out here, but I’m not ready to go searching through the jungle looking for ants . . . I’ll wait here at the helicopter!”

Did you catch that last sentence? We know that Mark did, because he replied, “Okay, Cal, we shouldn’t be gone too long!”

So with an at-the-ready helicopter to take Mark and Abbey around the island, Mark chooses to endanger his life and hers by crossing the ravine. Mark has confirmed that the log bridge (is it really a bridge, Mark?) is, as Abbey feared, “a little shaky.” What next?

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

From an old notebook

“Every worldly bed is an imperfect copy of the Ideal Bed.”
— Plato, as summarized in a textbook

*

“She had some kind of magic something.”
— From a documentary on Shirley Temple

*

“Don’t expect me to get involved in this vulgar circus,” the designer, Constantine Raitzey, shouted. “I quit!”
— From review of a book of Thomas Hoving, New York Times Book Review , January 3, 1993
*

“I’m meditating the bitter wisdom
of the philosopher and poet.”

*

You can lead a horse to water
but a pencil must be lead.
— Stan Laurel

Also from this notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch

[Stan Laurel did say that.]

Duce redux

In 2016 the helmet is made of hair.

I said in a letter to a friend today that Donald Trump has reinvented American presidential politics as neo-fascist entertainment. It is for anyone to just say no , as loudly and as often as possible.

From an old notebook

“The next number will be ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ sung by a member of the Eagles Club.”

*

“Chases Dirt” — motto of Old Dutch Cleanser, in poem by Ted Berrigan, “Smashed Ashcan Lid.”

*

I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: “avoid the authorities.”

Jack Kerouac, “Biographical Resume, Fall 1957,” in Heaven & Other Poems (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1977).

*
skyscraper, air port
faded metaphors

Sky Harbor
name of an airport somewhere, acc. to Norman

From the same notebook
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch

[From February 1992. The club member was — who else? — Alfalfa. The Ted Berrigan poem is here. Sky Harbor International Airport is in Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Norman!]

From an old notebook

John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, discussing Ashbery’s poem “Europe” :

Koch: There’s no key to understanding the poem, of course, no hidden meaning?

Ashbery: No, it’s just a bunch of impressions.

Koch: Why is the idea of keys and hidden meanings not appealing to you?

Ashbery: Because somebody might find them out and then the poem would no longer be mysterious.

“A Conversation,” in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991 , ed. Anne Waldman. (New York: Crown, 1991). The conversation appears to date from 1966.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery and Koch posts (Pinboard)
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk (Also from the notebook)

The new normal

Are full-body chills & nausea the normal symptoms of a Presidential debate?

— emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) October 10, 2016

Not from The Onion

[The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 7, 2016.]

It’s a genuine headline, and the article is not behind the firewall. The links in the article (all worth following) add up to yet another reason not to go to graduate school: toxic personalities.

[Note: This post makes a generalization about academic life, identifying no individual, in or out of academic life, as a toxic personality.]

Priorities!

More than four hundred faculty and staff have lost their jobs at my university as a result of Illinois’s manufactured budget-crisis. But there is still money for fireworks at the end of a football game. They ran just now for fifteen minutes or so, rattling windows at some distance from the stadium.

Priorities!

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

Reality TV?

Just a thought: is the cheap-looking background in Donald Trump’s self-serving taped “statement” meant to look like the kind of background one sees on cable news? Is the background meant to give (someone) the impression that Trump is answering an anchor’s question and not merely reading from a script?

[Fair warning: the link goes to the tweet with the video.]

Ginsberg Zippy

[Zippy , October 8, 2016.]

A tip of the hat to Allen Ginsberg. The last stanza of his poem “On Burroughs’ Work” (1954):

A naked lunch is natural to us,
        we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
        Don’t hide the madness.

The poem appeared in Reality Sandwiches (San Francisco: City Lights, 1963).

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
A Kerouac notebook page : Poor flowers