....you just don't see them anymore...
some early late thoughts on The Wire:
Joe Klein: “The Wire never won an Emmy?”
“The Wire should win the Nobel Prize for literature!”
I was re-watching the last-season of The Wire, after I finally got to finish Homeland (boy that Claire Danes huh). So the 2nd episode you get this quote by one of the news paper guys, and man does it bring to mind many things of a yonder-lost-era.
Haynes: “You ever notice how a ‘mother of four’ is always catching hell? Murder? Hit-and-run? Burnt up in a row house fire? Swindled by bigamists?
Price: “Tough gig, ‘mother of four.’”
Twigg: “Innocent bystander’ is worse. He’s always getting the short end.”
Haynes: “Not a lot of them around anymore. Not a lot of innocents anymore, you ask me.”
Phelps: “You know who there’s less of? ‘Statuesque blondes.’ You don’t read about ‘statuesque blondes’ in the newspaper anymore. Buxom ones, neither. They’re like a lost race.”
Finite prayers??
Dylan Smith, was a surf-boarder, who in NJ, helped rescue some
people during hurricane Sandy. But, tragically, he recently passed away surfing off the
coast of Florida. I'm on the People Magazine website (yeah I know, but I get it on my andriod) reading the article on his death, then I
get to the comments section and guess what? One commenter said 'my prayers are with
him'; another commenter wrote after that saying 'my prayers are with the peoplein Newton'!....wtf
my prayers are with the pepole in newtown
My
prayers are with the people of Newton...? Where did that come from? I know People Mag doesn't really call to the brightest of readerships, but still, I was flabbergasted. Then it occurred
to me that this person was being REAL and practical.... really he was being
practical. You don't see it yet? ...I'm taking you back to George Carlin's pulpit, so to speak...
Down and Out in Yokohama
On a lazy Sunday, such as this one, and as I lay on this couch watching Apocalypse Now for the nth time (for the quotables; and being made from Conrad's Heart of Darkness), I'm reminded of similar Sundays in a quiet Japan. Recovering from Fridays and Saturdays, we seemed to be out of wretched slumbers on Sunday mornings; awake and staggering from major metropolitan cities headed to our various h
omes in rustic towns.
Whether we came from Tokyo, or Yokohama we were always headed back, via Metro express, to the hill houses at Yokosuka or Atsugi to nurse our hangovers. But notwithout eradicating our collective hunger over a beef
bowl and miso soup. We spent the weekend quenching whatever thirsts we'd ganered all week; and our realization of however wild a weekend it had been, was felt over a silent beef bowl breakfast. 
There were mishaps in the misadventures though, for example, a fellow I knew, couldn't find a single article of clothing as he woke up in a motel one morning. Some were more trajic cases that involved arrests or hearing stories of drunks who'd been beaten by local Japanese gangs (certainly not the Yakuza clan, certainly not!) I'm glad that I don't have wild stories like that to tell, albeit I had some eventful nights.
Besides me there was my best friend Brent Jackson, my boy Diggs the fighter, Dukes (breath), Guy (rude boy), and a couple of cool white boys including Decker. Anyways, we slept in on Sundays not worried about wicked Mondays and rigorous work weeks. In my apartment in particular, I favored the couch in the living room down stairs, I'd be there with Lauren (or
whoeverelse before she came around) watching a sophisticated asian action drama. Everyone else was either on the matress in the living room floor, or the various rooms, going back to sleep, and watching their respective tvs. Brent was always in the guest room with incense lit and loud Japanese music, smoking with his woman. It was a time to remember. The sunlight tried to seep in thru the wicker screen doors that overlooked the valley. We slept still, with o.j., chuhais, and kool cigaretts dispersed about the tables. We were all broke suckers that spent recklessly and enjoyed our weekends as if the last. On Sundays we rested and pretended nothing about it. We were down and out in a foreign land and all we had was the atmosphere: each other, beef bowl, and the futuristic facade of Japanese media. 
DefJukies!!!!
omes in rustic towns.Whether we came from Tokyo, or Yokohama we were always headed back, via Metro express, to the hill houses at Yokosuka or Atsugi to nurse our hangovers. But notwithout eradicating our collective hunger over a beef
bowl and miso soup. We spent the weekend quenching whatever thirsts we'd ganered all week; and our realization of however wild a weekend it had been, was felt over a silent beef bowl breakfast. 
There were mishaps in the misadventures though, for example, a fellow I knew, couldn't find a single article of clothing as he woke up in a motel one morning. Some were more trajic cases that involved arrests or hearing stories of drunks who'd been beaten by local Japanese gangs (certainly not the Yakuza clan, certainly not!) I'm glad that I don't have wild stories like that to tell, albeit I had some eventful nights.
Besides me there was my best friend Brent Jackson, my boy Diggs the fighter, Dukes (breath), Guy (rude boy), and a couple of cool white boys including Decker. Anyways, we slept in on Sundays not worried about wicked Mondays and rigorous work weeks. In my apartment in particular, I favored the couch in the living room down stairs, I'd be there with Lauren (or
whoeverelse before she came around) watching a sophisticated asian action drama. Everyone else was either on the matress in the living room floor, or the various rooms, going back to sleep, and watching their respective tvs. Brent was always in the guest room with incense lit and loud Japanese music, smoking with his woman. It was a time to remember. The sunlight tried to seep in thru the wicker screen doors that overlooked the valley. We slept still, with o.j., chuhais, and kool cigaretts dispersed about the tables. We were all broke suckers that spent recklessly and enjoyed our weekends as if the last. On Sundays we rested and pretended nothing about it. We were down and out in a foreign land and all we had was the atmosphere: each other, beef bowl, and the futuristic facade of Japanese media. DefJukies!!!!
The death of the author...?
La mort de l'auter.
(preliminaries of a larger essay i'm working on.... just my initial assessment)
(preliminaries of a larger essay i'm working on.... just my initial assessment)
Have you ever struggled with a book that you particularly didn’t
see a point in reading, or found the verbiage of the book totally different from
what you’re used to, or even found yourself asking if the plot is at all accessible?
If you had, then Roland Barthes’ La Mort de l'Auteur is deceitful to say the
least.
If I get what Barthes is getting across, then there’s a
schizo-Balzac thing happening here: Balzac, the writer, who exists as a person
(the ‘scriptur’), and Balzac the author—that voice you hear narrating a the
text to you (the floating eyeball). The author, whom we usually assume we are conscious of when
reading a story is, in Barthes' case, non-existent, or at least should not exist
in terms of lit. criticism; he commands, “once the Author is removed, the claim
to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” Consciousness of the writer distorts
because the “book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into
a before and an after” and this is problematic as “every text is eternally
written here and now” by the reading public.
The “language speaks, not the author,
through a prereq. impersonality,” rendering the writer as conveyer of a message
in the performative act of using the mosaic of words, phrases, and semantics
from their culture, and for Barthes’ thesis, the author is irrelevant because
“a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Put that way,
we have the Ecclesiastical claim that ideas are not original, and this is at
the heart of the linguistic theory that looks only at the elemental matter of
sentences, down to their basic abstract units: words. With this reasoning,
words exist in the aether as units of discourse while we wiggle through them
ephemerally when we write. (I guess it’s kind
of like breathing oxygen i.e. I’m no more special than anybody else for
breathing. So writers are using words like we breathe; the text may be special,
but not the ‘scriptur’). Semiotic rules viz. the "I" example of the signified and the signifier.
the operator of the funhouse is slumped in a plastic control booth that reeks of sensemilia
Getting into the DFW anthology now...slow going though, I have other obligations right now.
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