The Savage God

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There was a man of double deed
Sowed his garden full of seed.
When the seed began to grow
‘Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to melt
‘Twas like a ship without a belt.
When the ship began to sail
‘Twas like a bird without a tail.
When the bird began to fly
‘Twas like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roar
‘Twas like a lion at the door.
When the door began to crack
‘Twas like a stick across my back.
When my back began to smart
‘Twas like a penknife in my heart.
When my heart began to bleed
‘Twas death and death and death indeed.

-- Traditional nursery rhyme

{Source: “The Savage God” by A. Alvarez}

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My Eyes

If my eyes get any worse, I may need to put an end to this sad little farce. As it is, I now live on the crutches of magnifying glasses, which afford me one final hold on this living, breathing world.

GTA 5

{ONTD}

Here is another reason to wish that I was in my 30s again. I am still inclined to give this game a go, but I doubt that I can give it what it needs. GTA 4 may have been my last true hurrah, and what a joy that was, as I even finally got to have all of my way with the whores. One question I have, with regard to the darker sexual side of GTA, will we still be able to molest and beat short-skirted babes and get upskirt panty-peeks? Will there still be strip joints? Or have they cut out all the sex and delightful misogyny?

Bigger questions: will my Xbox hold out through the autumn? The game comes out in September. Two, will I even be able to afford the game? We are talking close to a hundred dollars. Three, if I should be able to get the game in my hands, and if my Xbox has not burned out on me, will I be able to learn it and master the controls? Or has my age rendered this impractical?

We should have a better idea in a few months.

Hamlet (3,4) Father, Mother, and Son

Mother and son, melancholy prince and lubricious queen, Hamlet and Gertrude were locked in a passionate quarrel over Claudius, the interloper-king. The quarrel even started to get violent, but then Hamlet’s inflamed temper was stilled when the uncanny presence of the supernatural made itself felt, the elder Hamlet, the slain king, come again to set wrongs to right.

Hamlet is awed by this otherworldly intervention, to see his murdered father rise before him again. As one poet put it about the mad son seeing the ghost here in his mother’s bedchamber:

The frantic, ha! the Bedlamite - “look there”
The start - the heave - the stagger - and the stare!

The immediate family is brought together in this crossroads between the different worlds, between the carnal now and the spiritual eternal.

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Shakespeare brings together the father, mother, and son in a triangle that both domesticates them and strains against the aura of the supernatural visitant. The Ghost himself strives to communicate on a human level while preserving the quality of the otherworldly. He may still be veiled in gauze or smoke or strange light; but what most of all may set him apart is his inability to communicate with his earthly wife. This private room, in or from which the parents are normally ready to retire, must diffuse some sense of a husband-and-wife intimacy, in which the son is third person. Gertrude is left out of the father-son dialogue; but her presence remains a powerful factor in their relationship, and will determine the undertones of communion, submission, and rivalry.

-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”

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Cats

Sammy is so happy with his yowling routine that he has decided to break it out for my nap time as well. Sometimes I wish we never found those kittens in our back yard. Life would certainly be simpler without cats.

Yokota Days

It's morning, and I am still in bed sleeping. Mother let Carl in to wake me up, and he got me out of bed. I think we went out biking to a nearby town to play video games.

This memory came to me when I came out of my afternoon nap today. Instead of bemoaning not having friends, my subconscious mind gets inventive and kicks up this happy memory of a time when I did have friends.

Kafka

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Despite the curious fact that Kafka's body of fictional work is slender - three unfinished novels, a clutch of short stories, some prose fragments - it has generated such a gigantic industry of comment that only an eternal graduate student could possibly keep up with the output. Among the regiment of Kafkas now stalking the world, we have Kafka the Christian mystic (though he wasn't a Christian), Kafka the Jewish mystic (he had bafflingly complicated views about Jewish identity and religion), Kafka the Zionist, Kafka the sexual inadequate, Kafka the wicked capitalist (he co-ran an asbestos factory), Kafka the vegetarian, Kafka the socialist, Kafka the social butterfly and laugh riot, and, in Saul Friedländer's new essay - a very good and sane little book, which may safely be put into the hands of newcomers - Kafka the poet of shame and guilt. Having noted how often Kafka writes about canine encounters, I am myself tempted to write a monograph entitled Wie ein Hund: Kafka and Dogs. But it's a fair bet that someone will have beaten me to it.

-- Kevin Jackson at Literary Review

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Daily Fun

Random Pictures

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