Looking for Peace When There Is No Peace

Perhaps I've Been Looking in the Wrong Place for Peace
Maybe peace within is the only peace there really is--and there is never really any peace within. What animal has perfect peace on earth? None. Name one. Even in the insect world--except with something like ants, assiduous ants, each with a role to perform for a royal lump of bee jelly fat-ass queen bee ["I'm a king bee, and I buzz around your hive...I can give a hundred reasons to let me come inside" James Moore (Slim Harpo)--and this is something youthful intellectuals don't consider because they've intellectualized themselves to believe WE are unique--so they don't believe that we can be reduced to an ant-like society of robot workers producing royal bee jelly for the fat, sassy, and bloated rich, our future rulers, the plutocrat aristocracy--which includes Saudi Arabian princes, including our old pal Osama Bin Laden, Bill and Melinda Gates, good ole Warren "Thank you, Daddy" Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, Unka Dick Cheney, Bill and Hill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Mrs. Heinz Ketchup, Unka Teddy Kennedy, all the Kennedy clan, Okra Winfrey (I'm sorry, Oprah, Harpo spelled backwards, for Slim Harpo? oh no, Harpo Marx--I'd call my production company Lark X-ram if I were Okra)--and all the other filthy rich of the world and trust me, there are millions of these goons and they're rich enough to rule our asses easy--you know, with the help of the Blackwater gang, the new corporate army that is developing right under our stupid noses--our noses that have no smell capacity due to our smoking and sucking Vick's rub up our nostrils--ugh--and I had a point. I was going to compare robotic ant-like human cheap labor with scientifically stupid Christians who really believe that an underage Judean chick married to a 75-year-old Judean carpenter from the slums of Nazareth, Judea, bore the son of THE BIG DADDY in the sky and they ardently believe the totally unscientific legends (expressions of pure instinct a la Carl Jung) over the scientific fact of evolution...already I have no peace. Bringing up Christianity to me causes me to start growling so fiercely my heart overpalpitates and my fangs start dripping with mad-caused phlegm...I want some throat, dammit...

There is no F-ing peace.

There is some peace, a wee drop of peace before the storm of progress hits New York City. thedailygrowlerhousepianist just emailed around an interesting article on the old subject of predatory economics currently ruling the world--cosily fitting snuggly cheek-to-cheek with the Neo-Cons and their designs for us all--WE ARE INTENDED TO BE EVENTUALLY BE GOOD GERMANS, all of us, red and yellow, black and white, as the racially intent Christians put it. We are all eventually going to be like ants, worker ants, drone ants, but none of us queens--well, some of us can still get to be queens.

Are the tanks in the street yet?--"Oh, look, ma, the tanks say 'Blackwater Ground Forces' on their sides--oh, look, ma, I think that tank's fixin' to blow us to Kingdom Come, Praise the Lard and pass the biscuits and gravy." I will try and excerpt some of this predatory eco article later in this post of peace searching.

These posts--hell, blogging is anything but peaceful. I came across a new blog by a dude who was influential in my brother's end-life career as a college department head. It was a cheery start for a new blog--all wide-eyed and full of himself, underlining how he wasn't a native Texan but that he had become a more-than-native-Texan since embedding himself within the state and then becoming the head of an important studies department at a major Texas university. He was gonna stick with this blogging and was gonna have a fine time doing it. His first post was interesting, about a part of Texas that is very economically and ethnically interesting, the old coal-mining and oil-boom area of Texas that ran from Breckenridge north down through the Brazos River Valley through Strawn (especially Strawn) and Palo Pinto, the ghost town of Thurber, on down south of there into Erath County near Stephenville (no oil there just good land and good crops), mentioning my grandmother's novel in it in regards to Palo Pinto and where that name comes from.

That was it. I looked for more postings but there weren't any. That post, believe it or not, got about 10 comments--I mean 10 comments for his first blog entry! Wow! Nobody must read The Daily Growler based on comments--we've not gotten 10 in over a year of struggle (actually we've gotten nearly 500 hits and we've gotten over 220 comments, though most of the comments were SPAM invasions--"Hi, loved your blog, it's really cool...just like Jerry and I were discussing investing in Carl's new pool table project...it looks really promising, I kid you not...." All bloggers know these comments. You reject them without opening most of them. And then just as I think nobody is reading my posts, I get a comment from a very important person relative to the subject discussed in the blog, like my post on the poet Vachel Lindsay got back an interesting comment from the president of the Vachel Lindsay Society (the Vachel Lindsay fan club). That impressed me. I see now, it depends on your subject as to how many hits and comments you get--like my old pal l hat and his ex-blog-now-site--he gets tons of comments, some long and important in the discussion of l hat's research in the world of linguistics. l hat's risen from a coworker of mine in the grubby advertising game to I think a very important voice in US linguistics. I once told someone l hat was the smartest man I'd ever met and I've met a hell of a lot of men and women who were acclaimed for their smartness but I'd put l hat up against them in a intellectual cockfight any day. I've been lucky in my life; geniuses seem to like me and understand me; geniuses and criminal types--who was it said criminals can't be geniuses? Ezra? I'm thinking to myself.

Anyway, I keep going back to this Texas guy's site and, nope, nothing more than that one post. Either he realized he couldn't even dare keep a blog running and live a decent life at the same time or he died. Given my luck lately, he's dead. Don't worry; I can't curse the guy; since I didn't use his real name, he may not even exist; he's a figment of my imagination.

Just before New York City explodes into cacophony, it's 8:45 am as I type this--I'm listening to Virgil Thomson's film scores, The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains (really great American classical writing; as close to Ives, my gold standard in classical composing, as I've come--a little too precise for Ives--but at least in keeping with American musical forms with as little Euro influence as possible--I mean, Virgil was a Francophile and studied with Nadia Boulanger, who loved young American boys, especially the gay boys and girls--and certainly loved Virgil, though her influence was on his compositional style and not necessarily the music he had in his head he had to write out--it's American music written European compositionally--Ives, you see, even rejected European notation to a degree--that's why he loved experimenting with dissonances and antiphonies, especially quartertone music, the "playing between the cracks" music, which is how you perform the quartertone scale that Ives invented--you literally have to make a clear note out of the cracks, like from C to C sharp and then C sharp to D flat--you have to make that 5 notes--see! Isn't that exciting? Thomson's is pithy compared to Ives but he's cool and he sticks to the plains for his folk background--he grew up in Kansas City, Mo, and even played church organ in Kansas City, Mo. Virgil grew up in Kansas City at the same time swing hit town and Charles Parker, Jr. was down on 12th Street and Vine diggin' Lester and Buster Smith...Wow, think of that; that's how related all our music is, dig?

I am at peace for the rest of this day--except I can still hear the opposite of peace reverberating all around the world. Is the world neurotic or is it just me?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Today's www.languagehat.com for your entertainment:

ERRATA.

I was going through a pile of stuff from my distant past, and I came across an errata slip I seem to have acquired in the late '70s. There's no indication of the book it came from, and most of the half-dozen items are perfectly normal typos (p. 129, line 1, read "Gongbo" for "Gangbo"). But the first and last items are:

p. 57, line 14, read "pornographic" for "pomographic";
Back cover, line 3, read "literature" for "illiterature".

That's what's wrong these days: too much pomographic illiterature!