I was a virgin but I knew the messy sexual hunger of the word ah.

It was like two wires crossing that never should. It was like
   the invention
of sound for the deaf. Through my brother’s great, slightly open,
   bedroom door

I saw two heads bobbing for apples on the pillow, their mouths in the
   shape of ah,

the wet crystals of each breath falling on their faces. I heard that final
   ah they made—
the room ripped apart, the wild, injured noise of a wounded dog.

Hellow, little brother, my brother said. I hope we weren’t too loud,
   the girl said.

I couldn’t speak; the wind drifting through me as if through a cow’s
   skull in the desert.
I watched their fingers sift through each other’s hair again, pulling at
   the roots

of everything that had come before, and everything that would come after.

The girl had this way of murmuring, narrating in the dark. I pushed
   the door
further open. Ah that’s good, she moaned. Now you.

This is from Jason Shinder’s Stupid Hope. Admittedly, I don’t read nearly enough poetry as I ought and I’m struggling with the fact that this poem has been knocking around my head for three months now, poking itself into my thoughts on a fairly regular basis. What is going on in these lines is shaking me in two ways: first, it is so insightful and human but still masculine without being macho; and second, that I will never be able to put together a single coherent string of words that can do this.

It makes me never want to write a poem again —or maybe, more precisely, that I will never need to with this having been written— and, at the same time, want to write every poem I even briefly consider. I’m pretty sure this is what we’re supposed to be doing with poetry.

There is nothing wrong with creating something intimidating when it’s so wonderfully done.

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This is me. I am that pocket TV. In Black and White.

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Subtlety is more important than anything else, ever.

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I’ve been following the #OWS movement from twitter and fark.com, where there is at least one thread a day, if not more. Oddly enough, people in those very threads claim that nobody is paying attention or talking about #OWS. This sort of movement is exactly what I think we need right now, even if it’s not organized with a clearly identifiable goal. Because what the US needs is to recognize that something is wrong before trying to figure out exactly what it is. And I think #OWS is accomplishing one thing very well: they’re making the symptoms of the problem very, very clear. But like many alcoholics who refuse to admit they even have a problem, many Americans are refusing to admit that there is anything to protest. And some of them don’t think that protesting is the right answer, but would rather the protesters play the PAC game and attempt to work the system the same way the banks have. This is silly.

The boat needs to be rocked. I’m sorry your overpriced martini was spilled.

Matt Taibbi really nails the frustration with Wall Street. But I see Wall Street’s behavior as a symptom of a bigger problem with the US. That bigger problem is the cause of other ninety-nine percenters siding with Wall Street. I’m not even sure what it is, but there is something fundamentally wrong. And like an unexplainable rash on a patient being treated by House, M.D., we’ll find out that it is something that requires more than government intervention. I suspect it will require a reevaluation of American values, not just rules.

And unfortunately, with the recent DHS coordinated attacks on the occupy camps, Scott Olsen, and Zucotti Park, I am only seeing things get worse. The police are doubling down on their loyalty to the system, even if they know it’s corrupt. They might even care. But I doubt it. The police have been slowly turning into paramilitary thugs armed with tanks for decades. They like the system the way it is. Any given day, a visit to The Agitator shows that the state of law enforcement in this country is only getting worse. And the plutocracy loves it. They get thugs-by-proxy from wars on drugs and invisible terrorists and the serfs run around screaming injustice, too busy to worry about the secret aristocracy.

But I shouldn’t say crazy things like that. It sounds melodramatic even to me. But I do think that there is a problem with American values and that the problem with Wall Street is merely a symptom of that. I offer no solutions, but I’m not even sure what the real problem is yet. The abuses of Wall Street can be fixed, but I suspect it will just come back in a different industry, in a different guise unless we figure what is really wrong.

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The normal mindset among U.S. officials is that prior permission should be required to sell legal goods to a willing buyer. Kids selling lemonade on the street are shut down. A Missouri man has been fined $90,000 for selling rabbits (he made about $200). In Illinois, an artisan ice cream maker is being shut down for lack of a dairy permit. Manuel Winn was arrested, handcuffed, and booked for selling magazines door-to-door without a permit. A Maryland mother of three was arrested for selling $2 phone cards without a license. Lots of municipalities are going after food trucks. A group of Louisiana monks had to go to court to win the right to sell simple wooden caskets to consumers.

Hey now, if papa government doesn’t get his cut then these so-called entrepreneurs are doing a disservice to America, obviously. And bigger companies/corporations are easier to get bigger cuts from. When it comes to forcing businesses to follow regulations all these little businesses become a burden on the bureaucracy. Government loves big-business, because big business funds campaigns and is willing to pay the government all sorts of regulatory fees to stay off their backs.

I just finished reading Milosz’s The Captive Mind, and I’m reminded of a frightening section of that book recounting the way the totalitarianism of Stalin’s communism couldn’t abide by even one person being in business for themselves. Only here we have the government insisting that every single business transaction be closely monitored and shut down if it doesn’t meet their exacting standards, not crushed/killed. This is what libertarians really mean when they say we need deregulation in business:

These needless, onerous regulations would be objectionable at any time. But they’re particularly problematic when many Americans find themselves unemployed, needful of income, and thrust into the position of doing what they can to get by. That may mean a series of garage sales, or selling fruit from a backyard tree, or making a craft to offer for sale on the street, or going door-to-door offering handyman skills, or any number of other informal businesses. We’re making things harder on the least advantaged among us, and some are forced to take more social welfare because laws prevent them from making a living on their own.

This isn’t a jeremiad against all government regulation. Should commercial airline pilots be required to have a license? Sure. Are zoning restrictions sometimes legitimate? Of course. But is society really going to suffer if lemonade vendors, casket makers and purveyors of $2 phone cards sell their wares without permission? The default should be that free citizens can engage in commerce with one another, sans any prior restraint by federal, state, or local governments. It’s time to deregulate.

It’s not a matter of everything being a total free-for-all, but nobody should have to ask permission to go into business for themselves if said business has no repercussions on others. This is one of the biggest ways people have confused libertarianism. That Salon publishes articles like “Why libertarians apologize for autocracy” doesn’t help. Of course, Roderick Long made a very concise and clear rebuttal of the bizarre misinterpretation of libertarianism by Lind:

One reason for Lind’s conflation is that he automatically translates being anti-democracy into being pro-autocracy — because he assumes that the only alternative to democracy is autocracy. But in fact there is a third option; rather than the many dictating to the few or the few dictating to the many, what libertarians seek is a world where nobody is in a position to dictate to anybody — or at least to get as close to that situation as possible. (It might be argued that such a system actually has a better claim to the term “democracy” than those regimes that typically receive that label.) For anarchist libertarians, this means replacing the state entirely with networks of voluntary association; for minarchist libertarians, it means structuring the machinery of government in such a way as to make it as difficult as possible to abuse.

In other words, libertarians don’t oppose democracy (in the conventional sense) because they hanker after autocracy; they oppose democracy because it is too much like autocracy.

And even this point assumes, generously, that existing democracies really are majoritarian. As many libertarians have argued, the logic of monopoly government and special-interest capture explains why real-life “democracies” tend to be plutocratic oligarchies in democratic trappings.

There you go: criticism of democracy, in a quick youtube video. Obviously, that means I favor autocracy because I don’t think that democracy works justly. I think many naysayers of libertarianism (as Roderick points out in the linked article) are simply making an either-or fallacy. There aren’t only two options, but the one advocated by the left libertarians is so mindblowingly unheard of that most people dismiss it before they even hear an explanation.

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It is neither rational nor moral to suggest that words have some—let me risk lifting a word from Dr. Hart’s field—ousia or Platonic essence. Words mean only what people choose them to mean. That is precisely why nice no longer means “lewd.” Transpire came to mean something in English beyond its roots in Latin, from “giving off breath or vapor” to “coming to light.” And it is increasingly in use meaning “occur.” Over time, the vulgar, who created English in the first place, have their way.

This is essentially what Wittgenstein elucidates in his Philosophical Investigations: that words do not have any intrinsic meaning, but only gain meaning through use. Although Wittgenstein is not mentioned in the debate, the points their arguing are Wittgensteinian in nature.

To insist that words are intrinsically bound to their meaning is a referentialist argument (which some may recall is the basis for the Tractatus) and leads to paradoxes that wind up mucking up any rational explanations for anything. This is ethically unsound as it produces a situation where the word ‘ethic’ must refer to some thing that is ethical, the essence of ethics. Which, if we disregard that the word necessarily refers to some thing, but understand that the word simply means what we intend it to mean, through its use, then we arrive at a more truthful meaning of the word. That meaning, however, is fluid, not fixed.

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I have some good news—kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn’t heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls “the first comprehensive retrospective” in the world: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.”

So… the party’s over folks. Please dispose of any empty bottles, used condoms, golden apples, skeletons, overcoats, or whatever it was you were playing with in the trash before leaving. Last one out turn the lights off.

Whatever is next ought to be fun. Let’s take a nap until then.

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Taking a quick break from studying to do this reflects how much I don’t care about time management. I know it’s a crappy photoshop job: I’m no photoshop guru, and that it only took 15 minutes doesn’t help either.

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Second, and maybe a little late, but Miracle Jones at The Fiction Circus posted a wonderful guide to writing fiction: How to be a Fiction Writer. And I’m not sure which step I’m on, but I have a rough idea and my head hurts.

Third, be on the lookout for the first issue of ILK Journal soon. I’m not in it, but it is run by at least one very good poet and I’m looking forward to it.

I realize I don’t post a whole lot about literature, writing or anything like that here very often and, honestly, I’m not about to start. This place exists for my virtual fist-shaking at the world, absurd philosophical digressions and other miscellany. All of which is without schedule or purpose. I can go months without posting a damned thing. And that won’t stop either.

So carry on, you silly gooses, stop looking at my wacky blog and do something productive.

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Also, to cut down on the cynicism and inject some wholesome idealism, check this out: ALL-Left.net.

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