PR PR October 1: Good Luck!

Well, a bit of quote-bowdlerization by Jan Petter Myklebust here [quote omitted the part in green, missing the point], but JPM’s article’s basically OK.

Happy PR Day, October 1…

I like neither the name “Pussy Riot,” nor, I’m sure, their music. I  don’t like the style of their criticism of dictatorship. But I support with all my soul their right to name themselves “Pussy Riot,” play their music, style their style, and criticize dictators. A prison sentence for this is an appalling assault on freedom and the surest vindication of their indictment of Putin’s dictatorial propensities. It makes even the likewise autocratically inclined prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, with his FUD campaign against critical philosophers, look like Thomas Jefferson.”


Verba Volent

The Words: Clichés about being and wanting to be a writer. Unsuccessful would-be writer publishes as his own a manuscript that he found. Original author, now an old man (Jeremy Irons, dreadful American accent attempt, but the wonderful voice and speech impediment is there) tracks him down to reproach him. All extremely superficial about what it is to write and how and why one writes. Movie is just right for the mediocre non-talents that write books and make movies today. No, writers don’t re-type the manuscripts of others to feel what it’s like to write well. No, it’s not all about figuring out what’s fiction and what’s biography. No, real talent (or art) is not about being able to write a tear-jerker. Not the slightest sign in any of this that “writers” have minds (or ought to). The plot within a plot of having yet another writer tell the poacher’s tale is pretty pointless, as is the aspiring, admiring grad student (a standard Woody-Allen prop) who alternately drools over and dominates this supernumerary writer (weak shades of “Misery” here), played by Dennis Quaid, a mediocre actor who can only play superficial, learing lechers — but is, ironically, well cast for personifying this whole reduction of the art of writing (and movie-making) to whatever sells today.

Pannonian Paté

Pannonia’s Poster-PM, Viktor Orban, has found yet another scapegoat to blame for Hungary’s economic and social problems.

No, it still can’t be the fault of his own inspired policies of appropriating people’s private pensions, imposing a flat income tax on the populace, inflating taxes on foreign companies and banks, dismantling the independence of the banks and the judiciary, punitive press control laws, government-side FUD campaigns against philosophers critical of Mr. O, crony political and commercial appointments, property appropriation, self-enrichment and corruption, self-perpetuating rigging of electoral boundaries, covert and overt support to irredentist and fascistic groups and sentiments and using his unearned but technical super-majority to ram through an undemocratic and self-serving new constitution designed to keep his party, appointees and sentiments in power for decades to come.

None of these are to blame.

Now that it’s not the Russians with their uniforms who are responsible for Hungary’s malaise, but the Europeans with their suits (joining a long line of prior oppressors — Turks, Austrians, Reds, Whites, other political parties, foreigners, gypsies, and, of course, the Jews) — Mr. Orban now ascribes magyar malheurs to Europe’s preoccupation with protecting geese and pigs from maltreatment. The lament will sell well with the ladies who spend their time with geese heads firmly wedged between their thighs, forcing food down their throats till their livers get sufficiently diseased to cater for the French appetite for paté de foie gras. Hungary is one of the last European paté suppliers — but the supply of putative perpetrators of Pannonia’s problems (always excepting, of course, themselves) is inexhaustible.

Phaya

I miss you unendingly
Unbearably.

But what hurts still more
is that your life has ended.

That you can never again
wake to a painless day.

It’s not about me.

—-

I shall never know
if I ended your days
prematurely.

If I have committed
that unpardonable
irreversible
sin of sins
no torment
is punishment enough
not even if Pascal’s Hell splits into an infinity of Infernos
my soul searing in every one of them,
forever.

2012-07-10

Not About Me 2012-05-17

How much easier it would have been
for me

if all those unseen, unshown inner burnings,
all that vomiting, all that nausea,
all that delirium, all those punctures,
all those forced awakenings
all those forced feedings,
all that fear
about what is going to be done to you next,
by whom, where, when,

had been my fears and burnings and not yours.

How much easier it would have been
for me.

But this is not about me.

The loss,
now looming,
is not my loss.

I am powerless,

except to wrench from you
what’s left of you

and I will do it.

I have no words.

Only boundless, endless love,
for you, my own dear little Phaya.