11-02-2023, 07:47 AM
While waiting for Ashbery's poems to arrive, I'm reading, for the umpteenth time, Che Guervara's Bolivian Diaries. "Comedy of Cruelty" indeed. There is soemthing magnificent about Che's hopeless, completely Quixotic Bolvian crusade. Almost like the Passion of Joan of Arc. And after you read the introduction by Daniel James about the realities he was refusing or unable to realize, to read his diary entries, with their banal, hopeless details about digging tunnels and marching through the jungles along the Nancahuazu, the fuck-ups and frustrations, the periodic moments of battle against a happless peasant conscripted Bolivian army, until the American trained professionals arrive to squash him like a fly, is to feel the ultimate pointlessness of every crusade, before and after.
Poems are little private crusades against the incomprehensibility of the world. At the end of every poem, we are left like Che, wounded and waiting to be finished off. Nonsense poems are the exception; with those we can turn into angels and fly above the fray. Which is why I have moments when I think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are more worth reading than anything else.
Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair?
This where, were we sitting at a table together, I would hammer the table with my fist to indicate enthusiastic agreement.
I try not to think much about "America". America is death to the tenth power. We project it across a whole world. Of course, it's not our fault. We've been thrust into this movie like so many film-struck extras, eager to catch a glimpse of ourselves on Yahweh's Imax screen, but we mostly wind up on the cutting room floor.
Poems are little private crusades against the incomprehensibility of the world. At the end of every poem, we are left like Che, wounded and waiting to be finished off. Nonsense poems are the exception; with those we can turn into angels and fly above the fray. Which is why I have moments when I think Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear are more worth reading than anything else.
Who needs a Nazi in a Dictator Seat when you can have a Jew in a Director's Chair?
This where, were we sitting at a table together, I would hammer the table with my fist to indicate enthusiastic agreement.
I try not to think much about "America". America is death to the tenth power. We project it across a whole world. Of course, it's not our fault. We've been thrust into this movie like so many film-struck extras, eager to catch a glimpse of ourselves on Yahweh's Imax screen, but we mostly wind up on the cutting room floor.