Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts

Friday 11 February 2022

Charles Bukowski - The Last Night of the Earth Poems








In 2011 I read Charles Bukowski's Post Office and it was brilliant. He's like Orwell, not an extraneous word in the house.... and then I never read him again.

I'm always looking for an excuse to go to Southampton Central Library even though I've got a stack of books outstanding to read on my shelves. I finally remembered Bukowski and dropped by only to find out that the one book they had was overdue for months out on loan, probably never to come back. Would you like this one, the librarian asked.

The Last Night Of The Earth Poems. 

I made a face. I've never had much luck with poetry. OK I'll give it a try, and I walked out with one of the best books I've ever read.

There's no point going on about it when you can find out for yourself. It was a peerless companion in the pub with Ruddles and joints. It's impossible not to like Bukowski. 

Quarter Jewish, Nazi, Ugly, Funny, Sharp, Filthy, Bum, Gambler, Alcoholic, Loser..... Winner of words and meter.

Philosopher

I laughed out loud on my own many times.

If I get sent to Belmarsh, I'll be alright with just this one book.

Saturday 8 August 2020

VoxDay - Darkstream 637: Tolkien's Forge - A Mythology for England





Most of the intellectuals I would like to meet in real life would probably be too pompous to make it enjoyable.

That is not the case with Vox Day.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Moby Dick, 9/11 & Deepwater Horizon




When Melville wrote Moby Dick (a book that keeps dragging me by my hair kicking and screaming back to it) New York looked like the visual above and Melville could walk from one  pier side of Manhattan to the other. This is the kind of detail that the lecturer gives in order for us to understand Melville's attachment to the sea.

I've posted and written about this lecture before but as I've picked the book up recently I'm revisiting these excellent talks and right at the end of this one Cyrus Patel points out that Melville wrote this 9/11 premonition if we recall the disputed election between Gore and Bush and which letter writers to the New York Times explain well:

To the Editor:
Re “The Ahab Parallax” (Week in Review, June 13):
By drawing the parallels between the Deepwater Horizon and the Pequod, as well as the industries and economic imperatives that caused them to be, your article reminds us that a mid-19th-century genius like Herman Melville has something to say about the events and disasters of the early 21st century because the elements of nature and the qualities of human nature that govern such activities have not changed in the intervening 150 years.
Readers might be interested to know, however, that Melville’s affinity with current times was not limited to monumental sea disasters. In “Loomings,” the famous first chapter of “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael explains that he is compelled by fate to go to sea. Conceiving his whaling trip as a small interlude between major acts played out on the stage of human history, he lists “Whaling voyage by one Ishmael” between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “Bloody Battle in Affghanistan.”
While Melville could not have known the particulars of Bush v. Gore and the current campaign in Afghanistan, he knew well the forces that shape our history.
Carl Valvo
Concord, Mass., June 13, 2010

To the Editor:
“The Ahab Parallax” could have mentioned a haunting line from “Moby-Dick” that fits the present even better than it did the world of whalers:
“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”
David Singerman
Cambridge, Mass., June 13, 2010

I include the second letter as it was the first thing I read when I picked the book up again after an interlude of a couple of years. Synchromysticism at work people.

Update: I should add this related Deepwater Horizon/Moby Dick NYT article too:

A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search ofoil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”
Mark Power/Magnum Photos

Related

Bettmann/Corbis
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” — “Moby-Dick”
The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”
In the weeks since the rig explosion, parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville more than a century and a half ago have sometimes been striking — and painfully illuminating as the spill becomes a daily reminder of the limitations, even now, of man’s ability to harness nature for his needs. The novel has served over the years as a remarkably resilient metaphor for everything from atomic power to the invasion of Iraq to the decline of the white race (this from D. H. Lawrence, who helped revive Melville’s reputation). Now, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit are as telling as ever.
The British petroleum giant BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon to drill the well, has naturally been cast in the Ahab role, most recently on one of Al Jazeera’s blogs by Nick Spicer, who compared the whaler’s maniacal mission to the dangers of greed, “not just to a man such as Captain Ahab, but to all his crew and to the whole society that supports their round-the-world quest for oil.”
Andrew Delbanco, the director of Columbia University’s American studies program and the author of “Melville: His World and Work,” said, “It’s irresistible to make the analogy between the relentless hunt for whale oil in Melville’s day and for petroleum in ours.” Melville’s story “is certainly, among many other things, a cautionary tale about the terrible cost of exploiting nature for human wants,” he said. “It’s a story about self-destruction visited upon the destroyer — and the apocalyptic vision at the end seems eerily pertinent to today.”
Whaling was the petroleum industry of its day in the 18th and 19th centuries, with hundreds of ships plying the oceans in search of the oil that could be rendered from the world’s largest mammals. The 40-ton bodies of sperm whales could yield dozens of barrels, some derived from blubber and the rest, the most precious kind, spermaceti, from the whale’s head. The oil burned in millions of lamps, served as a machine lubricant and was processed into candles distinguished by their clear, bright flame, with little smoke or odor. In addition, whalebones could be used to stiffen corsets, skin could be cured for leather, and ambergris, the aromatic digestive substance, could be incorporated into perfumes. New England ports, the Houstons of their era, and fortunes were built with whale oil money.
At one point, the United States exported a million gallons a year to Europe, according to Philip Hoare, author of “The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea,” an obsessive disquisition on all matters cetacean, published in March. “The whaler was a kind of pirate-miner — an excavator of oceanic oil, stoking the furnace of the Industrial Revolution as much as any man digging coal out of the earth,” Mr. Hoare writes, adding the observation of the English statesman Edmund Burke to Parliament in 1775 that there was “no sea but what is vexed by” New England harpoons. While other kinds of ships sat nearly dark on the waters when the sun went down, a whaler could look like a floating Chinese lantern, the sailors luxuriating in the light produced by the fuel they carried. “He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it,” Melville wrote, rhapsodizing about an oil “as sweet as early-grass butter in April.”
But much like the modern petroleum industry — which began in the late 1850s, making it only slightly younger than Melville’s novel — whaling quickly came up against the limits of its resources. Hunting grounds near North America were wiped out by the early 19th century. And the lengths to which ships had to go to continue to find them led to the event that inspired “Moby-Dick,” the sinking in 1820 of the whaling ship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale in the South Pacific, more than 10,000 miles from home.

The Essex had headed there to hunt at a whale-rich site discovered only a year earlier. It was called the Offshore Ground, a name suggestive of the highly productive oil site known as Mississippi Canyon, where the Deepwater Horizon was at work when it exploded. Underwater fields like it have made the Gulf of Mexico into the fastest-growing source of oil in the United States, accounting for a third of domestic supplies.

Related

But in the same way whalers had to sail farther and farther for their prey, oil companies are drilling deeper and deeper to tap the gulf’s oil, to levels made possible only by the most advanced technology, operating near its limits. The Coast Guard has warned that this technology has outpaced not only government oversight but — as events have shown — the means of correcting catastrophic failures. An admonition from Nietzsche that Mr. Hoare cites in reference to “Moby-Dick” seems just as pertinent to the spill: “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
Mr. Delbanco cautions, however, against the tendency to read environmentalist moralizing into “Moby-Dick,” as often happens when it is applied to contemporary disasters. Melville did, memorably, wonder whether the whale “must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe.” But one gets the sense that he would have considered the loss a greater one to literature than to the ecosystem. “Even as he recoiled from their blindness and brutality,” Mr. Delbanco said, “Melville celebrated the heroism of the hunters who would stop at nothing to get what human civilization demanded.”
And, indeed, the analogies between the whale and petroleum industries have often been used by conservative economists as an argument against regulation. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, Phil Gramm, later to be a Republican United States senator but then an economics professor at Texas A&M University, made a name for himself by writing about the demise of the whale oil industry, done in by the supply shortage and the interruption of the Civil War, leading to the first energy crisis. The rising price of whale oil, he wrote, created an incentive to find an alternative. It arrived in 1859 when Edwin Drake drilled America’s first oil well, in Pennsylvania, and a process to make kerosene from it was discovered. The unfettered market followed its natural course toward the new fuel, and the crisis ended.
Of course, the spill has now rewritten the script for the debate about how the oil industry should be able to operate and scrambled the political calculus behind President Obama’s plans, announced in March, to open vast new areas to offshore drilling so as to reduce dependence on imports and win backing for climate legislation. The spill, looming as the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history, might in itself be incentive to push the United States more quickly toward new energy sources in the way it once turned to petroleum.
But maybe not. When the leak is finally stanched and the cleanup begins to fade from the news, one wonders whether Melville won’t be there again in his long whiskers and topcoat, offering up his gloomy wisdom.
One of the great underlying themes of “Moby-Dick,” Mr. Delbanco observed, “is that people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.”
“We want our comforts but we don’t want to know too much about where they come from or what makes them possible.” He added: “The oil spill in the gulf is a horror, but how many Americans are ready to pay more for oil or for making the public investment required to develop alternative energy? I suspect it’s a question that Melville would be asking of us now.”




Wednesday 29 August 2012

Call Me Ishmael


Recently I've taken to using art as a tool for the manifestation of the collective unconscious in a Jungian sense, and so as Moby Dick has been prodding me for over a year now since Hong Kong, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, I set up an RSS feed and curated a mood stream of every new piece of original art being shared with the world on the topic, and supplemented that with bits of data plumbing Jedi Knightery, to see if I can compile an emerging narrative

The learning so far is unsettling and an anomaly in expressionistic terms when looking back at history. It seems one of the key themes is not just the death of Captain Ahab and crew, but the death of Whales. Spooky whales levitating above the sea as if drawn in a state of mourning; lamenting the transit to a marine afterlife.

And then I awoke up from a nap just now, and for the umpteenth time was reminded of the book by The Guardian who week in and week out out are echoing the questionably tinnitus driven peals, ringing in my head and then out of nowhere, I realised the part of Moby Dick I had been so eager to share when reading this unusually off-topic novel for me that I find hard to follow. I overcame the age and relative formality of its language through the time tested clamour of Bangkok Go-Go bars. I find the neon, noise and nubility more soothing than when left a difficult text, alone in the distracting silence of home.


In any case, I meant to write how extraordinary it was learning of the whaling business in its heyday with respect to being the precursor for the entire edifice of imminent planetary industrialisation. That is to say, built upon the global scale of a wind powered floating business, in singular pursuit of yet another of natures exclusive and historically irreplaceable organic yields. If asked it is for this reason I argue leaving the oil in the ground instead of fuelling jet engines in the air for an economy levitating on the hologram of endless financial growth. What if say quantum entangled oil is the spice melange of a future interstellar life? To me, the what-ifs are a full nelson on the what-the-fucks line of reason.

I'll leave you with Melville's passage that left a slow burning mark upon me with a lesson on gateway drugs of the monkeys (homo consumericus) obsession with whale oil that was only displaced  when the black stuff leaking from the ground, looked like it had something going for it. 

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?



Moby Dick


Lurking around Youtube on the subject of Moby Dick last night/this morning I came across Cyrus Patel - Professor of English Literature at NYU. Each of these lectures on Moby Dick has around 5000 views (Jan 2011) which is rock star status for a lecturer on a subject that ostensibly doesn't pay immediate bills. 

He's amazing. 

I'm working my way through them but his lectures are a tour de force in video learning. Any more self-learning of this calibre and I'm flat out booked up on attention bandwidth for the rest of my life (or cloning is on the table). I've written a post about the process I'm going through with video learning that is still lurking in draft but this is brain crack stuff so I need to get it out there before I pop.

Friday 3 August 2012

T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot




About an hour and a half in total but not quite seamless in its story telling or as riveting as the great man's poetry. However it's an excellent introduction and I regretted learning he was known as the Pope of Russell Square when he worked at number 24 for Faber & Faber publishing who hired him for his business nous he'd earned in the city. I used to live just round the corner from this address in Bloomsbury opposite an old Charles Dickens address on Doughty Street but this was before the internet and I was never one to research things in libraries or I'd have mined the whole Bloomsbury Set thing a lot more I'm guessing.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

John Lash & The Master & Margarita




An upbeat talk with John Lash on Radio Free Humanity with Frater X. Despite the visual I've used, it's not all about control freaks, but as the FBI is now trying to stifle the ten percent of the population who reject the 911 commission report by labelling them as terrorists  it's a useful time to revisit The Washington Posts unprecedented two year investigation into the security state

The findings summary is concise and plain enough evidence that the NSA, DHS, CIA, FBI and the other 1200 alphabet soup agencies (not including the 1900 private companies) are delusional at best.

A few hours spent with widely available documentation on who funds war, and who gets to put their snouts in the trough from it is hardly a crime scene so complex nobody can figure it out.

John name checks Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita in this talk. Chapter 2: Pontius Pilate is my all time favourite chapter of any book.


Saturday 4 February 2012

I Claudius - Reign Of Terror (Department Of Sounds Familiar)



There is much to be learned from Robert Graves' I Claudius. Who the States deems too stupid and insufficiently polished to pay attention to. What kind of self serving psychopaths it elevates to the highest positions, and most telling is how ambition serves to bring the edifice down as it crumbles under the weight of its own absurdity.

The reign of terror and war on terror cannot exist without each other. But in the end they destroy each other.

John Hurt as Caligula is in a league of his own. So dark and sinister he's mesmerizing. A truly Kali Yuga figure.

Thursday 8 September 2011

On The Road




I'll never forget the briefest and best description of Jack Kerouac's, On The Road, given by a young man who like me was reading the book at the time. I was in my early twenties and he was about eighteen.

'Yeah it's brilliant he said. It's all "and then we did this, and then we went there, and then we got drunk, and then we had sex, and then we moved on, and then we fell asleep, and then and then and then"

Genius.

He went insane later in life and not for the first time I realised the brightest often do. But seriously this video is one beautiful piece of history. First I learned that beat generation meant 'sympathetic' and suddenly the Beat word made a lot more sense to me. Beaten up, beaten on. Only Kerouac could legitimately explain what it means. Secondly Jack goes on to read some of his work and I'm left wanting to read the book one more time if the road ever opens up for me again. Which it will. When I'm not expecting it.

Sunday 3 April 2011

Bhagavad-Gītā



Popular with Gandhi, Einstein, Herman Hesse and Emerson try to read The Bhagavad Gita as it was written. It's not fiction and it's free online at Google Books.

Friday 28 January 2011

Idioms, apophasis, paralypsis, proslipsis and ceasuras




I will never be of this calibre. Though as a card carrying, smile plagiarising 'Ye Olde Generalist' I notice he inadvertently invokes Wittgenstein's private language argument at 5.03. You can now enjoy that specific interpretation nicely transcribed via Youtube within this lecture. 

It's unusual that it's been transcribed given the length and youthful vintage of these lectures. In my experience, it's not a feature that world renowned quantum physicists can secure with their online Youtube presence; even with a hundred fold more views than the Prof has secured thus far. 

Maybe somebody realises he's contributing an historical analysis of history. That it's worthwhile to do this task promptly, as time is such a ruthless shredder of comprehension, context and nuance, when say scholarly Egyptology is peddling us informed opinion, in the early part of the 21st century. That's just one example.

Possibly it's just a great way (by his students?) to try and commit to memory the sheer scale and density of what this remarkable professor is able to linguistically retrieve, on-the-fly while loquaciously expounding on massively subtle different points. This is a talent I very much keep an eye open for given  the elegance that my (podcast) listening ear demands of me.

Go on. Listen to the first few minutes. Then get back to your copywriting or blogging or whatever. He's rather good.