A woman in a white bikini stands on the edge of the Atlantic at the very end of October in Delaware. Take that, Miami.
Smell of booze among the observers profound. Everyone – except for Les UDs, natch – clutches a cup with ice.
Conversation next to me.
“Sit down, bud. I need to talk to you.”
“Yeah, what?”
“About your bein’ investigated.”
“Later, man.”
“No. What happened. Why are they after you.”
“Later.”
**************
Marijuana Dog.
… the Halloween Parade,
Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Brilliantly sunny mild day, and a big
crowd turned out for the parade.
Les UDs adored it.
Bob Dylan finally acknowledges having gotten the Nobel.
… where she will take photos of the Halloween dog parade and many other things.
Of course she will continue to blog.
… which will now add $7.3 million to the tens of millions it has already paid out for the glory of having fielded the winning team of Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky.
… Soviet military hat, Twilight Zone poster for her office door, and, later in the day if she has time to get them, scones with orange icing.
UD prepares for this afternoon’s Halloween open house in the George Washington University English department.
… come into conflict with some of its employees. Grudgingly, Harvard arrives at a tentative agreement with its dining workers.
[O]ne of the Harvard endowment’s managers earned more than $11 million in 2013. The school’s president, Drew Faust, makes in the upper six figures, but also has access to perks like an official residence and retirement benefits that take total compensation north of a million dollars annually…
Yet at the same time as the school’s top officials have pulled in lofty salaries and as big corporations beyond school gates have rebounded in the ensuing years, hourly-wage workers have continued to struggle, with median weekly earnings just surpassing a 2009 peak this March. Elite universities, which employ both highly compensated, highly respected academic leaders and low-wage workers who sometimes feel invisible, offer a depressing illustration of the widening gap between the richest and the poorest Americans.
1. The importance of going to college.
[Derek Black] decided he wanted to study medieval European history, so he applied to New College of Florida, a top-ranked liberal arts school with a strong history program.
2. The importance of simple, unafraid compassion.
Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him.
This nation is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic.
That being the case, it seems to ol’ UD that the Halloween poems she features this year might as well display that element of the Halloween mood which is drift, dreaminess, creepiness, trance, immobilism, morbidness… UD‘s commentary is in brackets.
***********
OPIATE
Gottfried Benn (translated, Francis Golffing, 1952)
***********
Opiate, aconite
beckoning lust and cadaver
Lernaean fields
that my soul drinks
as its elements press forward,
hear its flute-song, its cry:
“As you infuse your poison
restore the self, past itself.”
[Lethe beckons. One wants to make an end of it, to cancel consciousness, if not through death and if not through sex, then through taking one of the many poisons that get the self past itself into a condition of twilight sleep, the self “restored,” fulfilled, in stasis. (“The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment...”) Lernaean fields feature streams to the underworld, to oblivion, and one’s soul drinks that up.]
Cosmogonies, spirits
in the smoke of Hyoscine
atomizations, syntheses
of change, Heraclitean:
These are the very same rivers
but not the Ποταμοί,
opiate, showers of rain
driving past river and self.
[One wants to make an end of it and enter new worlds – cosmogonies. One wants the opiated air to summon metamorphosing spirits. Opiates offer you a way out of not merely the self, but the trivial changes of earthly life, the dull sublunary differences that after all only hasten you toward suffering and extinction. Opiates shower a cleansing rain that takes you past earthly rivers and an earthly self into “river god” (potamoi) worlds that transcend the human.]
Amphorae stand and tables
Before shades, dream-drugged,
thorn of sleep, fresh poppy calyx,
welling white to our lips:
here, too, is the threshold
from which comes a sound of flutes
and as the garlands unfold,
wine and ashes subside.
[The final stanza begins and ends with opiating wine. Amphorae for millennia have been containers for wine, and here they stand in a dark room, a dream chamber into which we’re descending via the poppy’s needle, the heroin’s hypodermic, the opiate’s white (deathly) liquid “welling … to our lips.” Again, as at the poem’s beginning, we drift toward the seductively tuneful threshold of nonexistence. The poppies open up to us draughts and draughts of their white wine until the wine itself – life itself – and death (ashes) subside. Lust and cadaver – the fever and the fret – both go up in smoke.]
**********
UD’s colleague, Thomas Mallon, considers Trump’s unsuitability for literary fiction.
Trump lacks even the two-dimensionality required in a sociopath; the emotional range is as impoverished as the vocabulary. Trump simply advances, like the Andromeda strain, a case of arrested development that is somehow also metastatic…
Trump’s defeat … will not render him measurably more affronted or angry or whatever he is. Because he is a flat character, it will leave him unchanged. Even if he cries that the contest was “rigged,” he will not feel the defeat. I predict that he will use his concession speech to talk about how many millions of votes he got in the primaries and how throughout the fall his crowds remained bigger than Hillary’s.
As Don DeLillo pointed out in his most famous novel, White Noise, death while having fun is the quintessentially postmodern death.
