Bad photo leads to flat post

Dear diary,

You see? I snapped a photo of some books that I recently inherited. Although the awkwardness of the pic was not intentional, I kinda like it: it’s as if there’s zero gravity; or, even better, some counter-gravitational force which causes objects to fall up and stick to the firmament.

This will be a dull entry, very simple: in the main text, I’ll describe the photo’s contents; then I’ll share a rap track in the postscript.

Starting at the right we have a big book that I requested from the library. On my post “Standard life-love clickbait,” which dealt in part with the mad love that I found in (and for) Dante’s New Life, the secret agent codenamed “Speaking Mute” dropt a cryptic note that said:

I’ve recently discovered the maddest example of mad love in a very strange and very Renaissance Renaissance book called “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” – or The Strife of Love in a Dream…

Then I responded:

Sleep + Love + Fight!? I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before… I aim to get my hands on it A.S.A.P.!!

And since this title was initially nonexistent at my library, I almost ended up having to kickstart my bulldozer and heft pile after pile of NeoDepression-Era U.S. dollars to the publisher’s storefront, so as to buy my own copy of the book; but, a little later, when I checked again, the updated library results revealed that one new volume is available! so I put in a request for that and spent my gift card on Turgenev. So that’s why A.S.A.P. (“as soon as possible”) equals more than three months.

By the way, when I mentioned my bulldozer above, I originally wanted to phrase the statement in a way that would refer to my machine’s anatomy, specifically to its hoisting protuberance; so I researched the names for all its parts, and I was dismayed to learn that the scoopy-thing in the front is called the blade – isn’t that weird? You’d expect it to be named something more like shovel or bucket. That latter term is what the appendage is called when it’s on an excavator (according to a website that sells “spare parts for heavy equipment”); but the term excavator doesn’t have the same ring as bulldozer, so, in the end, I just decided to rephrase my quip and forgo mentioning the beast’s attractive body.

Now, this next paragraph, I admit, contains no sentence that was not stolen from the encyclopedia.

Anabaptists are Christians who believe that baptism is valid only when the candidate confesses his or her faith in Christ and wants to be baptized. This believer’s baptism is opposed to the Papists’ practice of baptizing infants, who are not able to make a conscious decision to be baptized. (Papist is a pejorative term referring to the Roman Catholic Church, its teachings, practices, or adherents.) The name Anabaptist means “one who baptizes again”. Their persecutors named them this, referring to the practice of baptizing persons when they converted or declared their faith in Christ, even if they had been “baptized” in their infancy.

I only offer the above cento to assure that my message is as clear as it can be, when I declare that we should anabaptize (by which I mean rechristen) the digging-gripping-lugging-heaving adjunct on any construction vehicle: no longer should we refer to this as the blade but as the pan, the trough, or the DROP CLAW.

I take that last, all-caps term from a “Crane Skill Game” that I found in Trouville, France. (A booth of glass was filled with “pony plushes,” which, by jerking a coin-op joystick at the booth’s exterior, could be groped by a mechanism hanging from the ceiling within.) Pardon one last encyclopedia burglary: This “Crane Skill Game” is known by a variety of other names, such as “Robo-talon”; “Dexterity Winch”; “Teddy Picker”; and “Very Stupid Engine”. It is a type of arcade game known as a merchandiser, commonly found in supermarkets, restaurants, shopping malls, bowling alleys, and church basements.

(There truly was a pinball machine in the basement of our family’s hometown church.)

Alright, back to the book pic. Next we have Blake’s brief epic Milton. That’s always the last title that we read in our daily readings, me and my sweetheart. We stick to a sequence. We’re currently working on a stack of five books. We enjoy Blake last because he’s the most exuberant: Blake is dessert. Before that comes the writings of Giorgio de Chirico (not pictured here) — certain fragments from his unpublished manuscripts are included at the end of our copy of his novel Hebdomeros, which we recently finished. I can’t recommend that book enough. We read the best books, me and my sweetheart; they have all the best words. Then before de Chirico we read Marianne Moore. In the photo, she appears second from the left.

It may be that proud spirits love only the lion or the elephant with its howdah. Miss Moore, however, loves all animals, fierce or mild, ancient or modern.

That’s from the essay by Wallace Stevens: “About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems”. The image that appears in the pic above is our library’s copy of Moore, but we used the remaining balance of our gift card to purchase our own damn copy of her life-work, because it’s so sublime that you cannot be satisfied with simply reading it in a borrowed volume that must be returned GOD FORBID but rather you want to hoard every one of her poems in your high-security bank vault atop your ever-growing mountain of super-wealth...

And before Moore daily we read one of the “sketches” from A Sportsman’s Notebook by Ivan Turgenev. As I said above, this was the other book that I bought with my gift certificate. Turgenev was on my mind because of another comment, this one from my colleague M.P. Powers – he listed Turgenev in answer to the “death-row book question” (my alternative to the “desert-island book question”; see also the Q&A section of my February 1st entry “Fresh Until February First”), among two others. The fellows of Powers’ trinity, by the way, are Goethe’s Faust and Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, both of which I love too and own copies of; but the only book I own by Turgenev is Fathers and Sons, the novel, which I love to death; that’s why I decided to buy his collection of short stories.

And before Turgenev (now I’m returning to the stack of five books that I read aloud with my sweetheart daily), we review the Hebrew prophets, represented by Tanakh in the accompanying photo – we chose to enjoy THIS after finishing Bentley Layton’s translation of The Gnostic Scriptures (and before THAT we read Alcoran) – we’re starting with the Book of Joshua, which deals with all the stuff that happened after the death of Moses.

Just as every good thing that the LORD your God promised you has been fulfilled for you, so the LORD can bring upon you every evil thing until He has wiped you off this good land…

That’s from 23:15. But I wanted to give a quote from de Chirico, too, because he mentions the aforesaid work from Arthur Schopenhauer in one of the miscellaneous texts that we read just yesterday – it’s a manuscript from the collection of Jean Paulhan which starts out like so:

What will the aim of future painting be? The same as that of poetry, music and philosophy: to create previously unknown sensations; to strip art of everything routine and accepted…

I love thinking about the future. Especially the future of art. After this beautiful intro, de Chirico provides a link to my own first collection as an example of what he’s talking about, and then he gives a quote from our good neighbor S.:

A truly immortal work of art can only be born through revelation. Schopenhauer has, perhaps, best defined and also (why not) explained such a moment when in Parerga & Paralipomena he says, “To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.”

Now I must end this entry – I’m out of time. I thus leave many deeds unfinished: for I still need to complete my comparison of the marketplace and the art world, regarding their respective stances towards the Ten Commandments, which I began in my previous post and planned to continue here; PLUS I need to tell you about the talk that I had on Saturday with my boss (it was nothing special, but we name-dropt some movies that I’d like to relay to you here); and I also have two quotes prepared, which I’m eager to share: one’s from Platoon (1986) and the other’s from Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); I already copied out both and saved them in a text file, but I can’t just plop them here on the screen without any explanation—I need to set them up! These things take time.

Oh yeah & the box set in the picture above is a series of documentaries directed by Oliver Stone & written with the historian Peter Kuznick – it’s called The Untold History of the United States. I’ve talked about this masterpiece here before, but I love it so much that I’m watching it again. I even finished the huge 700-page book that Stone & Kuznick wrote to accompany the films. Then after that I tackled Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire – a collection of seven historical novels (or novelized histories), which dramatize the U.S.’s infancy and adolescence (I don’t think my country is an adult yet, for better or worse), because such love is in the air. Never before in my life have I cared about politics, and I always thought history was soul-numbingly boring, but the 2016 primary fiasco drew my attention to all the blah-blah-blah and now I’m a dullard.

P.S.

I still have a ton of old rap demos that I need to get rid of, but the process of transferring these things onto the Internet is annoying, so I drag my feet about it (if you’re fashionably late to the non-party, my headquarters is at Bandcamp; I also have a base at YouTube); but today I forced myself to share another—here’s some excuses:

More than a decade ago, my friend purchased a new computer program that came equipped with a number of “hip-hop FX” (that is, beats & noises), so I asked him if he would produce a rap album for me (I normally just create my own stuff on my analog 4-track, plus I HATE recording on the computer, that’s why this seemed like a worthy idea). So my friend said yes and clicked his mouse & made a few tracks for me to rap over. Below is one of them. Neither of us knew how to EQ or mix or master any of the sounds on the newfangled system (as I said, I am only familiar with analog equipment), so the volume levels are noticeably off.

(Now I just realized that I already explained all this in the italicized note that precedes the lyrics in the following audio link. I will never forgive myself.)

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/170629917081/in-2004-my-friend-bought-a-sound-production