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Knife Fighting Advice

Two people find each other in a bar, have words, and are told to take it outside. One has a knife, the other does not.

Political Advice

The need to find a name for everything, especially in the midst of context collapse – government that relies on its own impunity, media beholden to access and corrupted beyond its ability to notice – finds its gloomy audience. The cynicism of artificial everything takes the degradation of beauty as license for further spoils. People who profess faith in a universe governed by a monarchy do not care about the state of democracy. Capitalist buzzards scavenge the carrion so much begins to resemble.

Slow down.

The rush constitutes a critical element in the systemic failures, which while calculated and tangible only accelerate via failures of imagination. The first thing to go, assumed to be light, harmless, perhaps fun but inessential and so left unguarded while the currencies get blast-proof doors and laser alarm matrices. But crushing the capacity for imagination has always been priority. Note the uncomfortable complicity in putting away childish things at our peril.

Consider how little attention has been paid. How much agency remains? Where to start with such a disfigured capacity to imagine? No wonder. Little wonder. Disordered priorities. Go back. Name a recent wonder. A glimpse, a moment handed over to wonder. Everything is there.

The subconscious renders, speaks beyond language, as much older than language, flickers with light, premises lightness, joy, love.

Own the lapses, welcome fears. Correct them. Re-order indicates a new, different hierarchy that understands exact necessity. Smells of earth and wild garden fragrance always near the top.

Oh, and always bring a knife just in case.

Image: Fifth Avenue skyscraper blocking the view of the Empire State Building.

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Roiling the Newness

Recent NYRB piece on the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki—of Uruguay and Poland, respectively, is deserving of elevation and you, dear reader, deserving of its riches:

“Poetry,” Ida Vitale remarks in the essay included in her new collection, “like death, perhaps, is surrounded by explanations.” Now living again in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she was born in 1923, Vitale can take poetry’s prestige for granted. Over the past century or more Latin America has commanded a world stage: the writings of César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Pablo Neruda, among others, hardly require explanation or defense. Her own cohort, the Generation of 1945 (the “Generación Crítica”), was instrumental in keeping Montevideo abreast of cosmopolitan developments in literature, theater, and critical theory. Vitale has received numerous prizes in Uruguay, Mexico, Spain, and France, as well as the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 2021. Yet her first selection of poems in English translation (over seventy years’ worth of work, presented in reverse chronological order) contains just one brief manifesto, “Poems in Search of the Initiated,” registering a delicate protest against the diminished readership for poetry:

The challenges awaiting a less confident reader may include unusual verbal constructions, not worn out by use, and a richer vocabulary. These are not impossible to face. The pleasure of enthusiastic decipherment releases a mysterious energy that moves not only the pages of poetry, but also the world’s great prose.

Mystery, Vitale notes, is “that which is reserved for the mystai, the initiated,” and “on the other hand…leads us to the idea of ministry.” But in a democratic age—or, more accurately, an age when democracy is teetering toward authoritarianism—“the initiated” evokes the specter of an elite despised on all sides: “rarefied poetry for the few, almost for specialists.”

Speak, dear authors. Everyone needs to be intrepid about everything, and that definitely includes reading and writing, but also looking at sculpture and paintings, watching dance performance. Hearing poetry.

If we are what we pretend to be, as Uncle Kurt, it’s past time to get serious about that.

Image: Author photo with Mrs. G in the old part of an old city.

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Is Luck a Skill?

This is a crucial point – also crucial, too, is that it does not undermine capitalism but does expose its chief weakness, which itself eerily resembles it’s great strength. Funny that.

Green does not equal smarts or vast expertise, and probably should denote rougher trade qualities like foolhardy gumption. The minute we get too sensible about things is the minute we turn toward convention. The rich we have now are bold mostly in the outlandish links they’re willing to go to protect their winnings, in common parlance. Of course our new billionaire overlords, who believe in nothing so much as their own genius, know nothing but to go into a crouch, expand their fortunes and spend millions to save their billions from the gov’mint. Acute failure of imagination. Symptomatically nouveaux riche – the only question is will they be able to hang onto their green cushions long enough to learn to doubt the perfection of its comfort?

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Greens

Collard Greens, that is, which allegedly represent the wealth in your future but are really just soul food. Sometime this afternoon take:

One mess (approx. 1 1/2 pounds), Collard Greens

Four cloves of garlic

one tbsp. red vinegar

soy sauce and salt, to taste.

Soft boil Greens and spices for an hour. Serve with black-eyed peas and cornbread, maybe a Newcastle or two.

Good year and good luck.