MARX AS ROMANTIC

I don't like Romanticism. I find objectionable the overly emotional and morose sonnets of Keats and his like. I find Shelley absurd, and only wish that he had been drowned in a toilet for bothering me with his verses. I can't stand Sylvia Plath and wish she'd carked it a decade sooner. I can't stand the pose of Napoleon with his hand in his shirt. I reject the entire 19th century and all of its flotsam and jetsam. It's not just Marx. Marxists get on my nerves, but then so does the entire 19th century with precious little that I would keep from that time period. Edward Lear is salvageable. Two or three poems by John Clare. I can't even stand Baudelaire.

I prefer the dry reasonable eras when comedy was king. I like John Locke, and George Berkeley. I'm against the passion and excess of the Romantics, and prefer limits and reason, and a sense of humor.

The overblown Romanticism of a golden era to come in which the fishwives dance the watusi with the labor unions and everyone lives happily ever after just strikes me as absurd. I'm against passion, I'm against excess, and I'm against Romanticism in every single facet of life. Romanticism was the worst era in human history. It created a trough of human misery through its lack of limits. Rousseau is poppycock. Hegel, too. Please take it away with the canvases, the books, the fashions, and the singing.

It is totally nonfunctional, good only for laughs precisely because it takes itself too seriously. I reject opera for much the same reason.

Light opera I can occasionally stand. But full-blown Wagner?

I'd just as soon listen to the speeches of Pol Pot translated into Yiddish and sung by a guinea pig.

HUMOR STUDIES

To study something we also ought to study its opposite. To study humor we ought to also study humorlessness.

POLITICAL LOTTO

Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq are spinning. Will they all end up as Democracies with a separation of church and state in the next 20 years? Will they come up three cherries in a row?

If so, Bush's policies will be heralded as the greatest thing that's happened since Reagan took on the USSR and simply by calling them evil caused the wall to fall, and liberated half of Europe.

Will Bush's policies have the same effect throughout the Islamic world -- in which one gender at present has to go around with a bag on their heads unable to concentrate on the basics of geometry and calculus?

The lotto wheels are spinning. It's a gamble. If Bush wins, then his win will go into the same column as Lincoln's war on the American Confederacy, and Reagan's war on the Kremlin.

We here at Lutheran Surrealism are always hoping for an opening of a multiplicity of competing factions in which freedom of inquiry rather than dogma is the name of the game.

Being born in America is like winning the lotto.

We wish the same for others around the world. It's the system that matters, and good systems are worth fighting for.

AGONISTIC ANTINOMIES OF POETIC PREFERENCE

Peter Davis has a book out about the 15 top books of various poets. Instead of favorite books I tend to think of agonistic interactions in which I choose one. For instance I choose Bachofen over Nietzsche because he chooses patriarchy (marriage) over matriarchy (treating women as whores). I choose Shakespeare over Milton because of the natural language, and Suckling over Lovelace for the same reason.

1. Between Hegel and Kant I choose Kant because beauty is never superseded by politics.

2. Between Calvin & Luther I choose Luther because he leaves the arts intact & inviolate.

3. Between Breton & Soupault I choose Soupault because he realizes that Georgette is a human being rather than a symbol (Nadja).

4. Between Reznikoff & Williams I choose the former because the roughage stays in the poem.

5. Between Moore & Pound I choose Moore because she has ethics that I can stand & a deep taproot into the living Christian tradition.

6. Between Ginsberg & Bukowski I choose Ginsberg because of his spiritual interests.

7. Between Ginsberg & Corso I choose Corso because he chooses the poem over politics.

I generally choose one over another in an antinomy -- but the ghost of the other remains & is never completely exorcised.

There are no ideas except in people.

INVISIBLE HAND

Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand said that by each individual following their own self-interest that this would contribute to the inevitable common good of our community.

Law would thus be relegated not to the regulation of the economy but to protecting the process. That is, if you sold unsafe candy to children because it was in your best interest to do so (strychnine cheaper than sugar?), then the law would LOCKE you up.

Does (should?) nature/evolution follow the Invisible Hand Theory? If each creature simply follows its own self-interest, is this inevitably a good thing for the food chain?

Is Nature Smithian?

There is LAW and then there is CHAOS.

There is nothing in-between.

RELATIVE SIZES

There are 600,000 manhole covers in New York City.

There are 222 manhole covers in Delhi, NY.

COINAGE/KOINONIA

I have seen your heaven, moon & stars
& been impressed
I've seen our slums and whores
& been depressed
I have seen the faces of presidents on coins
& the value of some of these has not been clear
In God We Trust
And yet they say
Money is the root of all evil
If our souls will circulate in heaven
Why must our bodies be part of the rotisserie
A barbecue of beef & butt
I have seen your heaven, moon & stars
And our cars are called Mercury & Jupiter
We drive them about
Loving your circular radiance
& imitate it with our coins.