Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (1957)

I had been aware of Robbe-Grillet for a long time, of course; first from before I'd overcome my distrust of experimental fiction and viewed him with deep suspicion, and then after with the idea that, hey, maybe I should read him sometimes, what? but never doing it.  But after that fairly stultifying E.H. Young Novel, I wanted to read something that I REALLY WANTED TO READ, not just something I'd picked on an inexplicable whim.  Hence, this.

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Arguably-cathartic shouting

 I just cannot deal with this shit.  Trump is the most coddled fucking baby the world has ever seen; sure, laws are different for the megarich and us--and, let's face it, us and the actually-poor--but any other rich fuck would STILL be in deep trouble if they did what Trump has done.  But NO, we have to keep him around, and the fucking New York Times and fucking cable news channels HAAAVE to pretend that any of this is sane or reasonable AT ALL, and it drives me crazy.

Some fucking billionaires gives him some hundreds of millions of dollars to pay his bond, and you think MY GOD, SO MANY PEOPLE could be elevated by that money, but NO, we've decided as a society that it's okay for people to be billionaires, and as a result, sure, let's just shovel it down the throat of an enraged, shrieking toddler.  It's like something from a fucking Hieronymus Bosch painting.

And I REALLY just can't even with Trump surrogates and right-wing propagandists in general, spraying their poison through these dumb fucking compliant cable news shows and their youtube channels.  I can't see someone like [censored for legal reasons, though there are many, many examples] without thinking, this is a fascist.  And we all know what the only good fascist is (and we all know that if Trump said anything along those lines, the media would be tripping over itself to pretend that he didn't mean what he obviously meant).  I, personally, would prefer not to murder anyone, but it seems just indisputable that the world would be better off if they died.

I just hate the fact that nothing fucking means anything.  Obviously there's no point in "debating" fascists, or pretending that anything they say is useful or in any way worth hearing or considering, but society, even the saner portions of it, just refuses to accept this.  We have to let them go on, because...free speech...constitution...slipping into a coma...to repeat myself: NOTHING FUCKING MEANS ANYTHING.  It's all just so many empty signifiers.  So fuck these people, and may they all die horribly in a river of burning feces.  Humanity had (has? how pessimistic are we being here?) SO MUCH potential, and these shitheads are absolutely desperate to just piss it all away to hurt the people they want to hurt.  Goddamn them all.

How to Tell if Your Roommate Is a Dead Cassowary

So look, back in the day, when the web and I were young, there was this website I liked with that title.  I remember it pretty darn well. There were helpful diagrams along the lines of

A cassowary:

A dead cassowary:

and there was a numbered list of ways to tell, which became more and more baroque. Fuck me, I even remember how the last one conclude: The other speaker here is a child you have just met: "'You think that's bad--this guy's roommate is a cassowary.' 'My roommate's dead,' you say."

So this was a real damn thing that existed. It may have been silly and inconsequential, but it existed and I liked it. And now it is...gone, unless my search powers just can't find it (there's nothing on the wayback machine, fwiw). How many thousands of OTHER early websites have just disappeared from existence? Obviously, this is not in the top billion concerns that one might have with the world today, but damn, man. Imagine if BOOKS just...disappeared like that. You want to revisit that novel you remember from high school? Too bad; it is now non-extant. I have nothing profound to say here; nonetheless, bah.

E.H. Young, The Bridge Dividing/The Misses Mallet (1922)

This was published first as The Bridge Dividing, then as The Misses Mallet.  Is that latter name more commercially appealing?  Maybe.  Everyone likes mallets.  As far as I know.  Interesting facts about Young: 1) she was in a long-term relationship with her lover and his wife; 2) She was an amateur mountaineer.  That first one MIGHT have some degree of relevance to the novel; the second-- seems doubtful.  Though I certainly WISH it did.

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I despair.

I really do.  The plight of the Palestinians is clearly one of the most, if not THE most, important issue today.  It warps reality with its gravitational field.  At first I was reluctant to use the word "genocide"--gawd, am I turning into a centrist?  I was worried on some level that it would make me look extreme or hysterical; there's no point in denying it.  But, I mean, the UN definition fits like a glove.  

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Cleaners from Venus, "Denmark Street"

 So I've been listening to a lot of Cleaners from Venus lately--that being the name that poet/musician Martin Newell uses to record.  He's not prominent enough that his lyrics are consistently available online, so here's a song I've been sort of preoccupied with.  I don't know what "me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray" [Wray?] means, but I find it strangely evocative.  Anyway here, it is:

No Queen Matilda to ease the trials

Of Celtic drunks with broken smiles

Who miss their station by several hundred miles

Asking "where are the fields of Saint Giles?"

The street of starlets who stop to say

"I'm going to make it some day"

Where all the lepers got rich or ran away

Leaving me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray

In every window a song for sale

Whistled by the milkman can't fail

You get that hook line you find the holy grail

There's a check for you later it's in the mail

And David Bowie is on the way

The ambulance has gone today

But don't you worry I think he did okay

Now it's me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray

Some boy could have been me

Been apprehended by the CID

Looks old but he's twenty-three

Down Tin Pan Alley seeking sanctuary

There's music leaking from underground

Somebody's madness turned into sound

To get them dancing all over London town

This is rags into riches the wrong way round

Now Machiavelli drops by to say

Penny for your tunes boys eh hey

It's never happened in any other way

Not for me, Queen Matilda, and Captain Ray

A growth industry for hard times

I have a good idea for a business. It's going to be called either Algr or Indundatr, depending on marketing research. Our target audience is poor but virtuous and hard-working young guttersnipes, hobbledehoys, and tatterdemalions. Once they've downloaded the app and registered, they just have to click a few buttons, and we will immediately dispatch one of our agent to fling the nearest rich industrialist's child into a body of water, so that they can rescue them and get a sweet job from the grateful parent (and probably also marry the child, if she's a she--we'll have to charge a small extra fee for that).

So anyway, how about it? Can you help me program the app? We'll be drowning in venture capital in no time.

Let's listen to the pre-Beatles hit songs of 1964!

This image was posted on some facebook music group I'm a part of:

I'm not exactly sure where the rankings come from, I don't know why it goes to fourteen, and I have no idea what "big bonus" means, but it's an interesting look at the calm before the storm, just before the British Invasion changed everything.  Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to listen to them--see what our parents' generation were grooving out to.

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