forget about a common language now with the merchants of death in U$A, Klanada, EuroTrashLandia, U-Inbred-Kingdom, Israel . . . . add NZ and AU to the batch!

Nemotode:

Just poking some fun into the Substack, “Plagiarist Harvard President Resigns. Her Scientific Wrongdoing Was Fine Until a Month Ago — Mixed Feelings about this Affair” By Igor Chudov

I already railed about that one here: Oh, No — Jews in Neverland: Harvard is on their Cutting Board?

Then, the comments from some “person” — Peter Ruff: “Rubbish in, rubbish out – your words prove that, Paulo. When analysis is based on erroneous information/attitudinal origins, NOTHING will change that to TRUTH. Try again!”

…then,

“Oh, deary, deary me! Your powerful words have hurt me to the depths of my being!! I shall be forever changed and redirected to your path of enlightenment …………..? Do you actually read back the RUBBISH you blurp out in these ‘comments’ paulo? You are able, just as EVERYONE else, to add your 5c worth to anything you like. Unfortunately for you, 5c is a GROSS EXAGGERATION of the value of your ‘input’, and everybody else is able to tell you so, if they can be bothered to take/ waste such time!”

+—+

God I hate that Un-United Inbred-Queendom talk — “rubbish” and “deary, deary me” lingo.

“A few sandwiches short of a picnic”; “Bagsy”; “Bee’s knees”; “Blinder”; “Bob’s your uncle” ; “Brolly” ; “Cheeky” ; “Chuffed” ; “Dench”. So many fucking marble-mouthed and infantile shit coming from the bloody British Isle —88 very British phrases that will confuse anybody who didn’t grow up in the UK

Long live the childish fucking Brittania quips.

Then this email — from a dude I wrote a piece on:

Justin: I hope your well, Paul. I have been working on a new website and wanted some of the pics you took. I did some deep searching into old emails to find you. its a long shot but worth it as i remember you took great pics. i really hope your well. it was a real joy meeting you. you were one of my all time favorites.

Paul: Hey, Justin. Long time now hear or see. I’m looking, man, stuff on an old camera and old computer. Trying to track down all those images from that gig I had as Oregon Coast Today columnist.

Your story, along with a few dozen others, is in this collection I did a while back:

You might get a kick out of it, or not.

I’ll keep you posted.

Justin: Trust me man, i know. please dont feel as if it is urgent or a big deal because its not. I just went to your area recently and my lady was saying lets go say hi to Paul. I didnt think it would be appropriate but did decide to find a way to get back in  touch with you and wondered how you might be doing. then i thought to my self… he probably has some cool pics for my latest online projects and it shouldn’t hurt to ask.. we really liked working for you for a few days. you left a lasting impression. its not everyday i go through old emails to find a past client and check in. i hope your well.

+—+

“Framing Houses, Framing Lives: How a Lincoln City kid makes good on his goal to build things” by Paul Haeder / October 12th, 2019

+—+

Shifting to Extinction, under a green sky, man:

The eighth largest saline lake in the world is a Utah icon. More than 10 million birds take sanctuary there every year.

And sometimes, the Great Salt Lake smells like rotten eggs.

That distinct tang is caused by hydrogen sulfide, a colorless gas that can be harmful in high concentrations. When concentrations are excessive, it “could kill you or (H2S) can cause nausea and headaches, or more commonly, it’s just a nuisance,” said Wayne Wurtsbaugh, a retired science professor at Utah State University who studied the gas.

The Great Salt Lake isn’t the only saline lake that produces hydrogen sulfide, there’s also the decaying Salton Sea, California’s largest lake.

“It used to be that people say, ‘Oh, it smells like dead fish,’ but now there’s no more fish in the Salton Sea. So you can’t say it smells like fish, it smells like hydrogen sulfide,” said Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist at Loma Linda University.

WHO: Peter D. Ward (Earth and Space Sciences, College of the Environment, University of Washington, WA)

WHAT: Under a Green Sky: Global Warming the Mass Extinctions of the Past and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

WHEN: Published 2007

Peter Ward has an evocative style of writing that was able to transport me to the various digs and periods of ancient history that he studies, was one of the reasons I wanted to write about this book. Additionally, he paints a vivid picture of what our future could be like with catastrophic climate change.

Ward is an expert in mass extinctions. He has spent much of his career looking at Ammonite fossils to see where in the fossil record mass extinctions occurred and why. Through his studies, he’s discovered that many mass extinctions were greenhouse extinctions.

So what does greenhouse extinction look like? It looks like this:

The water’s purple because there is no longer any oxygen in the water in this lake near Kamloops BC. The bacteria in this lake ‘eat’ hydrogen sulphide, which smells like rotten eggs and allows the bacteria to take over when there is no oxygen in the water. No animals can live in this water – we need oxygen to survive.

Ward puts it best in this description of what the earth would have looked like at the end of the Triassic period—

‘No wind in the 120-degree morning heat, and no trees for shade. There is some vegetation, but it is low, stunted, parched. Of other life, there seems little. A scorpion, a spider, winged flies, and among the roots of the desert vegetation we see the burrows of some sort of small animals – the first mammals, perhaps. The largest creatures anywhere in the landscape are slim, bipedal dinosaurs, of a man’s height at most, but they are almost vanishingly rare, and scrawny, obviously starving. The land is a desert in its heat and aridity, but a duneless desert, for there is no wind to build the iconic structure of our Sarahas and Kalaharis. The land is hot barrenness.

Yet as sepulchral as the land is, it is the sea itself that is most frightening. Waves slowly lap on the quiet shore, slow-motion waves with the consistency of gelatine. Most of the shoreline is encrusted with rotting organic matter, silk-like swaths of bacterial slick now putrefying under the blazing sun, while in the nearby shallows mounds of similar mats can be seen growing up toward the sea’s surface; they are stromatolites. When animals finally appeared, the stromatolites largely disappeared, eaten out of existence by the new, multiplying, and mobile herbivores. But now these bacterial mats are back, outgrowing the few animal mouths that might still graze on them.

Finally we look out on the surface of the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps. Yet that is not the biggest surprise. From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color – a vast, flat, oily purple, not looking at all like water, not looking anything of our world. No fish break its surface, no birds or any other kind of flying creatures dip down looking for food. The purple colour comes from vast concentrations of floating bacteria, for the oceans of Earth have all become covered with a hundred-foot-thick [30m] veneer of purple and green bacterial soup.

At last there is motion on the sea, yet it is not life, but anti-life. Not far from the fetid shore, a large bubble of gas belches from the viscous, oil slick-like surface, and then several more of varying sizes bubble up and noisily pop. The gas emanating from the bubbles is not air, or even methane, the gas that bubbles up from the bottom of swamps – it is hydrogen sulphide, produced by green sulphur bacteria growing amid their purple cousins. There is one final surprise. We look upward, to the sky. High, vastly high overhead there are thin clouds, clouds existing at an altitude far in excess of the highest clouds found on our Earth. They exist in a place that changes the very colour of the sky itself: We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison. We have gone to the Nevada of 200 million years ago only to arrive under the transparent atmospheric glass of a greenhouse extinction event, and it is poison, heat, and mass extinction that are found in this greenhouse.’

I listened to him here, years ago. And I had him on my radio show. More: Ted Talk: A theory of Earth’s mass extinctions

Read his stuff. Really. Climate change confusion, chaotic climate heating denial, all of that, way way off the fucking mark.

CATASTROPHISM

Starting in the 1700’s, scientists, especially geologists, described the world a gradual continuum, where “the present is the key to the past”. The opposite theory, called catastrophism, was left for fringe writers like Immanuel Velikovksy.

Peter’s newest book re-writes the history of life on Earth, not from the viewpoint of gradual evolution, but from the many catastrophes that have occurred on this planet. That’s not just the impact of asteroids hitting, but gigantic and long-lasting eruption of volcanoes, the almost frozen times known as “snowball Earth”, and of course the many periods of serious global heating.

This new book also originates from Ward’s important earlier book the “Medea Hypothesis”. That is an answer to James Lovelock’s and the Gaia hypothesis. Instead of life arranging the best circumstances for its continued survival, Ward finds in the geologic record that life forms have often been suicidal, destroying the conditions required for survival. Does that sound familiar?

The new book is: “A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth” by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink.

If life bumbles along through long periods between catastrophes, often of it’s own making, where do you think we are now? Are we on the edge of the next mass extinction, or could that be thousands of years from now?

+—+

Before I paste an amazing poem by Pablo de Rokha, just one more example of the racism of Jews in Jewish State of Occupied Turtle Island and their brethren in Jewish State of Jewish Occupied Palestine. These fuckers are the enmy, but you already knew that.

[Photo: White Supremacist = Palantir CEO Alex Karp arrives as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer convenes a closed-door gathering of leading tech CEOs to discuss the priorities and risks surrounding artificial intelligence and how it should be regulated, in Washington on Sept. 13, 2023.]

Welfare mother fucking cheat: In a letter to shareholders in November, Palantir CEO Alex Karp lamented that the US firm was “one of a few companies in the world to stand up and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast.”

In early December, Karp publicly criticized corporate America for staying silent and not standing up for Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities.

Last year, Palantir secured multi-million dollar government contracts, including with the US Army to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning into battlefield applications and with the UK’s state-run National Health Service (NHS) to develop software for a patient data-sharing platform.

US data-analysis software giant Palantir Technologies announced on Tuesday that it will hold its first board meeting of the new year in Tel Aviv to show solidarity with Israel, as the country is nearly three months into a war with the Hamas terror group.

“We stand with Israel,” Palantir said in posts on X and LinkedIn. “The board of directors of Palantir will be gathering in Tel Aviv next week for its first meeting of the new year. Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”

+—+

Now, moving to real humanity . . . .

Yankeeland — Pablo de Rokha

EDISON

(the practical life) 

The customary, the concrete, the brilliant vulgarity the methodical and mechanical reason, the reason, all the reason, the marvellous patience, Edison.

And the honest donkeys of wisdom, the human sciences.

Categorical, calm, admirable, infallible machine, Edison, Edison is “the reflective intellect” of the learned; and OK, and OK, and OK, what’s the use, what’s the use of thought, when it’s used? …

***

Gesticulating over the oceanic sounds of his fabulous, fabulous, gloomy, democratic I, laughing at the blue paradox of success, dazed by facile and unanimous oratory, unanimous and facile from marvellous, epic, personified companies, and the imminent, financial megaphone of advertising, colossally crowned with his mathematic, philharmonic, topographic, economic, NORTH AMERICAN sorrows, listening, listening, as if at the edge of a river, to the oblique theme, sweetly oblique, babbling mutely, mutely, mutely, mutely, the assistant secretary to his enormous soul Mister Dollar, Yankeeland, Yankeeland, contradictory and innumerable uncle SAM, innumerable, innumerable, uncle SAM, uncle SAM sighs towards the Atlantic with the monumental panting of his large, cosmographic lungs and his dynamic attitude, dynamic and unmeasurable!..

***

And deleterious, funerary, deleterious, findesiecular, clinical, pathological symptoms, the dark great-great-grandsons of the Mayflowerian philosophers — geometrical, frugal, priestly, metaphysical, systematic protestants — procreate and assimilate, assimilate and procreate, eat, drink, walk, think, speak, live, live mechanically, live at seventy thousand leagues a minute the novel brew of making, sense and end, reality of LIFE.

***

Births by telephone, deaths by telephone, weddings by telephone, the whole epic, everything by telephone, falling in love radio-telegraphically, live and die in aeroplane, one hundred, two hundred kms above the level of the old human values, the old human values, exist in machine, meet in machine, remember in machine, see in machine, in machine, the spectacular grey of angles, rectangular triangles or polygons, horizons that sum up the cosmic psychology according to Yankee students of mathematics, measuring the emotional, intellectual, sensational phenomena, adopting the decimal system as an initial unit, as an initial unit and the dollar as an end, getting married for sport, killing for sport, promoting girls’ divine bosoms and widows’ wombs, filming daily sadness converted to I, the man, I, the man, I, the man converted to wandering, ephemeral panoramas, ephemeral panoramas and blue themes … (Country of DIVORCES!..!..).

***

Roosevelt

Bilious like an animal and big, big, bigger than man, the sum of beast and God in just one, just one cataclysm, the times, the peoples, the tombs; complete extension of material, he has one hundred volcanoes in his finite mouth and he talks, he talks like the earth would talk, if it were to speak: to earthquakes; he is the earth, the entire earth clotted with gloomy meat; moral philosophy comes to lick his tremendous hands when he tells it to: tsk!.. tsk!.. tsk!.. such that he’s the owner of honest and sincere dogs, sincere and honest … and Roosevelt’s global boot honours his bones — today, the maggots eat his tongue — .

***

Woodrow Wilson

Situated in the stupendous, stupendous mercantile rostrum of Washington, prevailing over the vague hills of the Right of yesterday and its intercontinental platforms, looking towards no, no, no where, Woodrow Wilson reads the Bible to the moderns.

*

And his sad lies sound like the anachronistic music of the suburbs, rustic, autumnal, dominical, and the rainy voice of the dead in the tragic tragedies of the era.

*

Murmurs of crowds and laurels, laurels and crowds he overwhelms the fluttering happiness of the cordial, nuptial white doves; and the international nightingale keeps getting quieter, getting quieter, getting quieter little by little until it falls, falls definitively before the guffaw of the dark, red men who come from ancient graves, or the ha!.. ha!.. ha!.. of the tubby, sceptical, phlegmatic, idiotic bourgeoisie, or the ha!.. ha!.. ha!,, of the tubby, sceptical, phlegmatic, idiotic bourgeoisie.

***

Your practical, economical and vile face, Yankeeland, is, is, is today’s black commercial poetry, today’s black commercial poetry and the horrible, hyperborean beauty of business for business’ sake; a great, spiritual zephyr crowns your skyscrapers, hazy stars sing in the nude above their meteorological surfaces, they sing in the nude winking those blue eyes, blue, blue, blue and the moon, the moon comes with the golden slipper of twilight, revealing its leg to the sun, revealing its leg to the sun, revealing its leg to the sun or the epigram, the pornographic-melancholic anecdote of the florid leagues of men on the couch of the eternal towers, eternal like the dreams of the tombs; Yankeeland, your great ways of being, Yankeeland, Yankeeland, they constitute, they constitute and they are an aesthetic interpretation of the world, for having come in projections, in volitions, in sensations beyond the immediate, the appearance of things and the human voice …

***

Melodiously unfurling its tentacular antennae, Yankeeland smiles and hisses like a snake at the simple Americans of the South, its enormous, antediluvian eye hypnotises birds and animals, citizens and trees, nests, women, children, flowers and fruits and, like a gigantic reflector that catches all of the sun, all of the sun, it drowns in light, drowns in light, drowns in light, it sets fire to, it burns, the formless music of the rural landscape, so eminent, the dark flower of the city, situated between two great premises: 1 000 000 000 000 000 dollars and a canyon of 100 inches … however the little workers of Chile sharpening their scythes modestly grumble, “C’MON SIR” …

***

It thunders and sings, sings and thunders down the paths of its well-rounded youth, like the shock of the ages through the colossal drum of the earth; there it’s all tremendous, there it’s all monumental, there it’s all transcendental, everything’s paradoxical, everything’s paradoxical there, everything’s hyperborean, absurd, disconcerting, macabre, bilious, outlandish; and above all, above all that, it fluctuates, the contaminated fog over the swamps, over the swamps, the mercantile romanticism of the sonorous Yankees, sonorous like empty tombs, sonorous like brilliant men, sonorous like the sun, like the spirit, the eternal, instantaneous voice of the bulging crowds, of the silent multitudes, automatic, oceanic, tragic …

***

And those rough blonde men play golf, baseball, golf, tennis, or they smile, they smile dancing foxtrot, onestep, shimmy, twostep with their women of wood, of wood, of wood, beautiful, stupid, artificial, made up to the nines, flippant about society, mechanical señoritas, mechanical señoritas, electric, numeric, synthetic!.. and just like a woman who clumsily reveals her breasts in public, they play sport, they play sport in underpants above the dignity of the world, they play sport in underpants above the dignity of the world, and they box with the infinite.

***

The grand country of the North declaims: action, emphatic, Dionysian, sullen action, and justifies itself by itself; work, work, work in vain, casually, casually, for sociology, opinions, ideas, opinions, man, God, history, science, philosophy, and doing for doing’s sake like it were the world’s purpose!..

***

Chicago

The stupid, monotonous, rheumatic fumes, the horizontal, industrial fumes, the horizontal fumes that come from the factories, that walk over the rooves attaching themselves to malign beasts of the dusk, the chimneys, the unanimous chimneys smoke their enormous cigars interminably and Chicago thunders, thunders, thunders like one hundred trains left to tumble from the heights, from the heights of the mountains down into the modest, common valleys, down into the world, into human things; public plazas and women, idealistic trees, palaces, markets, asylums and inmates, sanatoriums and laws, blonde, blonde schoolgirls, businesses, the sun, the moon, the earth, the abstract heavens smell of swine, smell of swine, smell of swine, and Chicago, Chicago, the grand, painful, plutocratic, ironic, industrial city, grumbles the same thing as the plebeian swine: … , oink!.. oink!.. oink!..

***

Thermometer, chronometer, barometer of the twentieth century, Yankeeland sums up the psychology, the trajectory, the form, the diagnosis of the actual instant of the epoch, TODAY’S sickness; and like this, like this, it sings on its skyscrapers, on its global airlines, on its ocean liners, in its palaces, in its underground, aerial, underground railways, on its travelling zeppelins, travelling, travelling like travelling swallows, on its trucks, on its tractors, in its cars, on its mountain statues, on its mountain statues the nocturnal, emphatic hymns, the square, practical, human feats, the TREMENDOUS moan in which each voice is an ocean, each voice, the epic about bells, bells and tombs, agonies getting darker, agonies about our DELUSIONS OF GRADEUR; and like this it cries with laughter on its financial, bankable lovers, in its blues, contradictory and useless bunches of gloomy voices, in its cubic, mercantile romanticisms, our yellow, sickly ideology of Autumn; and like this, like this, like this it howls, it howls in its complete, total illusion, black like a dead body, white like a boy, grey like memories, and colourless, colourless like the human character, our red apostrophes on materials, our red apostrophes on materials and the oblique cries of modern MAN …

Adding up the world, the whole world, Yankeeland, Yankeeland opens its IMMENSE mouth immensely full with dead birds!..

***

Walt Whitman

Like a god who builds poems into mental slaps, Walt Whitman is seated, is seated in Yankeeland over the majesty of life with an understanding of the heart, the right leg in Beijing and the left in Berlin, the whole body over ALL of the world, playing poker with the dead over the blue carpet of the infinite, chatting with the stars and hearing, hearing, hearing the concave and transcendental noises of the era, the perpendicular YANKEE, the sad tones, sad like the new lawns of Manhattan, tender like little children, tender like little birds, tender like little animals, harmonising with dusk, dawn, dusk and the voice of rustic farms …

*

Cosmic gestures converge on him like the soul of sounds toward a radio station or like maggots toward graves, full of music, everything full of music he smiles and the earth flourishes, he cries and it enters winter, he sings, he sings and so it’s as if birds, things and men, mountains, tombs, countrysides, cities, red cities, skies, oceans, wives, girlfriends and mothers, children, whores, criminals, statesmen, merchants, the good and the bad, orphanages, asylums or honest homes were singing the first song of the ages; he sings, Walt sings the good, he sings and obscure people tell themselves, THE WORLD is singing, the world; he sings and skeletons ask themselves, who? … and open the eternal door with their enormous fingers, full of the yellow of graves, full of the yellow of graves.

*

The ants say to him, Cheers, Walt Whitman!.. the large, honest elephants, How are you, brother? … and the tortoises, the toads, the King of Spain, the beggars, the politicians, the cows, the President, the horses, the bishops, the bus drivers, the moon, the turds tell him, they tell him while slapping him on the back, Brother Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman you’re OUR brother, OUR brother Walt Whitman.

*

He wasn’t ever born; Walt Whitman was never born; one hundred million epochs add up to the age of the giant and uncreated, uncreated globe, created by us Walt Whitman of Manhattan, Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman of Manhattan; and his grand figure dissolves, unpicks itself, loses itself in THE FIGURE of the earth enlarging the earth of the earth.

***

Blood Jehovahs, pallid emperors, two ROTTEN tyrants rule Yankeeland: money and movies … is it possible? … yes, it’s possible, it’s possible … ha! ha! ha!.. ha! ha! ha!

All Yankee philosophy is yawning naked is yawning in the idiotic theatres of the cinema; Yankeeland is an enormous cinema spectacular: all Yankee sociology is yawning naked is yawning between debit and credit, credit and debit, debit and credit from subterranean banks; Yankeeland, Yankeeland could be a huge box of wealth in which bark the blacks, the blondes and Protestantism … — … all Yankee philosophy is yawning naked is yawning in the idiotic theatres of the cinema!.. —

— Yankeeland: you’re imbecilic, you’re conceptual, vulgar, and being, being stingy, being fat, being priestly, you’re, oh!, you’re the divine flower of genius, you, superfluous and bureaucratic dough today you’re, today you’re the earth’s exemplary blue!.. is it possible?.. is it possible?

***

Like a large blonde cow, like a large blonde cow, Yankeeland’s fixated on chewing over, chewing over, chewing over the future of beasts and defecating paradoxes; the cowboys bellow their green sonnets to force, cornered like buffaloes, like buffaloes with prehistoric speech, they bellow, bellow like carriages drawn by rhinoceroses, the poems of the freest man, the freest, freest, tree brother, water brother, fire brother, fire brother; ocean liners, trains, trams, tired dreadnoughts, sailors, Orients, hydroplanes, monoplanes, biplanes, aeroplanes, blurry, macabre zeppelins, factories, tentacular power plants, red jails, mutes, woods, arsenals, asylums, the asylums!, clinics, warehouses, hospitals, courts, hotels, churches, restaurants, brothels, banks, shops, stock exchanges, clubs, bars, cameras, taverns, dens, public offices, racetracks, cemeteries, the cemeteries, THE CEMETERIES, the cinematographers they howl, the giant, melancholy, black cranes howls, and the common, cosmopolitan, metropolitan traffic howls, rotary and sad, sad and rotary, they howl, they howl the heavens howl, Yankee land and sea, completely Yankee, completely Yankee, Yankee, the heavens howl in English, earth and sea howl in English, the heavens, the earth and the sea howl in English; the prostitutes cry and the modern actress sings, the midwives cry, the minions cry, the schoolgirls cry and the multimillionaire thief sings, the newspaper vendors, the workers, the carpenters, the shoemakers, the bakers cry, the blue, infinitesimal bricklayer early in the morning cries, and the aristocratic pimp sings in his underpants above series of intimate things, the poor husbands and wives cry, the maids, the poor decent folk! and the banker, the politician, the playboy, the loan shark, the promoter, the filmmaker SINGS, SINGS, the beggars cry, the poets, the deformed cry, cry like germs or like the deceased who illuminate the past with the nocturnal light of memories, and the joyous, sonorous bourgeoisie sing, sing, sing, sonorous and joyous like an animal, luxury chirps, misery cries, the child plays, the elderly meditate, the sick and the wise meditate, charlatans and journalists denounce, the merchants and opportunists give speeches, the mechanical singer of the future insults the graves, the mechanical singer! the children laugh, the girlfriends laugh and the flower smiles, and a song of stables and farms, of sowing, of fields, of crops, a song, a song of vegetables and wheat fields, of toils and westerlies, a song smelling of flowering vineyards, of ripe fruits arrives daily, from the agrarian estates and the sanctity of wheat and bread, and the dignity of wine and salt, honest water and milk, and the black MAJESTY of coal, souvenir of the countryside and skeleton of the world, skeleton of the world and sadness …

Yankeeland drops the ash, the ash, the honourable ash of its capitalist cigarette on LIFE’S wrinkled face, and smiling, smiling at the sun it says to it, Lord, show me the path!.. show me the path!.. and the SUN, the SUN, the SUN agrees …

***

Land of blue, tragic, mechanic, geometric men, poets of the positive, the practical, the practical, Yankeeland keeps improvising, improvising, improvising and inventing, creating THE WORLD in each moment, creating THE WORLD, and writing the grey SONG of the silences with ingenuous type, dizzying, dizzying and with ONE HUNDRED copies SIMULTANEOUSLY; there all’s possible: improvise millions and poems, improvise cities and people, improvise adored presidents, improvise complete democracies, improvise new sensations from nothing and outlandish truths that sum up today’s lies colossally, improvise heroes, wise and saintly heroes, warriors, artists, thieves, governments, merchants, boxers, sad songs or millionaires, improvise musical, resonant, admirable palaces of one, two hundred and three hundred floors, study the sun and the stars or cosmic gravitation, with fruits, fruits, roots, roots, roots, flowers and leaves like songs or better, mountains, with vegetation, with vegetation, with vegetation from noble, agrarian estates, improvise squadrons that stain the oceans with oil, gin, discipline and English tobacco, dollars and pipes and dollars, improvise anonymous societies capable of making, capable of making a belt of gold around the moon and silver slippers for each star, each star from whichever ocean, improvise eternal things, light, the past, the present, the future God and the tombs … land of blue men, land of blue men, land of telephonic men, land of telegraphic men, land of telemetric men, land of gramophonic men, land of taximetric men, land of CINEMATOGRAPHIC men, land of CINEMATOGRAPHIC men, land of automobile men, land of men becoming electricity and spirits becoming gasoline, sexes becoming coal, wombs becoming coal, tongues becoming coal, brains becoming coal and funereal souls BECOMING gas, land of blue men, land of blue men, land of blue men with the chemical, cynical blue of the laboratories, Yankeeland!.. Yankeeland!

Its heart cries sad, awful mists, sad awful mists, and in the public squares of its worldly gestures the multimillionaires keep smoking, keep smoking, keep smoking anachronistically fat pipes fat and romantic; they shout and proclaim, proclaim and shout and shout grotesque warnings …

***

MOUNTAINS, MOUNTAINS, MOUNTAINS of fifty, sixty, seventy floors above the height of old architectures, that is, houses, Yankee houses in Yankeeland, ocean liners — coffins, coffins for errant worlds, mathematical or red, black or melancholy; fortunes whose simple units, whose simple units keep multiplying, multiplying, multiplying into absurdity like drops of water in winter, like drops of water in winter, the romantic deciduous Autumn leaves, the juicy Pacific fruits in summer, the guffaws of spring, the eternal rain of human pain, the eternal rain of human pain, the eternal rain of human pain, the eternal rain of human pain, the BLACK sands BLACK from the grave, or the square root of the planet, or the square root of the planet; tractors, cars, trucks, tractors, cars, trucks full of landscapes, multitudes, throngs, conversations or events; aeroplanes that have laid only one egg, only one egg — the sun — in the sky’s nest, the sun, the sun in the sky’s nest; trains, trains, trains in which it is as if the houses, the city and the country were walking; factories that have telephones to infinity and whose managers speak one thousand, ten thousand languages; periodic periodicals that seem like republics; universities, libraries with BUS, tram and car services crossing, crossing the marvellous church; cities like continents, villages like territories and rural farms, farms the same as establishments for agricultural education in Plato’s Republic; clinics like enormous cradles, enormous blue cradles and hospitals full of gardens; beauty parlours where streams gurgle, gurgle with delight, rivers, rivers, rivers of flourishing intimacy, and where, where the girls ARE dolls: the small, small, small feet, the small, rosy breasts, the medal of sex like a flower, open; hotels and grocery stores, grocery stores and hotels that give the ambiguous sensation, the ambiguous sensation of sailing, sailing, always sailing; film-makers with capacity for 100 000 tonnes of stupidity and 300 000 of mothers in law; morgues, morgues, slaughterhouses, houses of slaughter, in which they carve up herds and herds of exemplary humans each day, etc., etc. — vile pharmacopoeia — … divorced and black, black, black and divorced; gastronomic, saucy, philharmonic, photographic, philatelic, athletic, sporty, cinematographic, literary, linguistic, psychological, philosophical, pathological, commercial, social, legal, emotional CHAMPIONS, champions of love, agronomics, theosophy, alcoholism, criminology, etc., gubernatorial, funereal, automobile champions, etc., etc., etc., … cemetery of champions, nursery of champions, it’s all there in Yankeeland.

***

John Rockefeller

( … once there was an ass, once there was an ass that spoke and smiled, smiled and spoke just like man; watching it, the elderly, sanctimonious ladies would say, Ass plus ass!.. and walk on.

But one fine day it died … so the elderly, sanctimonious ladies came to chew on its excrement because the excrement was of pure gold … ).

*

Pierpont Morgan

P.M. looks like a sinister safe urinating in PUBLIC VIEW; he lost his head, lost his head in the maternal urn and he has four feet, LIKE cows, four feet, four feet and 1 000 000 000 dollars.

*

Andrew Carnegie

Well-bound books are excellent ornaments, excellent ornaments, excellent ornaments and, furthermore, you can read them; reading is good, reading is good, reading is good — not too much — reading is good; I have money, a lot of money, “Will I buy meringues? No, so … etc.” “Will I buy pine nuts? No, so … etc.”, “I’ll buy books, books, books, books; WELL-BOUND are excellent, excellent ornaments!..”

*

Charles Chaplin

The boys and girls applaud the simple, elemental and macabre attitude, sad and broken, sad and broken of a happy man, happy, happy as a tomb; and Chaplin howls about nothing, beneath the FLOWERING peach of puerile smiles, just like a cadaver, just like a cadaver crowned with carnations; bunches of fruit, crowned with pain, ulcers and maggots, and crying with all THE INTESTINES.

*

Pearl White

A little bag, a little bag of artificial sweets is Pearl White; or better yet, an enormous, horny rose OPEN in a blue jewellery store …

Pearl White, Pearl White, silly little animal, sweet, fat, A kid of fifteen nude, nude between the sheets while it’s raining, getting dark!..

*

William James

Philosophical wisdom, judgement, erudition, erudition, equanimity, virility, dignity and a beastly, volcanic heart like an adolescent ideal; here’s William James.

New trees, new birds and another one hundred theological virtues crown the poet of practical psychology, W.J., and it’s as if THE PALE NEW YORKERS remain watching, watching, watching, motionless, watching century to century, the sad, agrarian party, sad about the West, its elemental stars and the moon …

MULTIPLYING HIMSELF in ideas William James smiles at William James.

*

Jack Dempsey

Animal, animal¸ too much animal, the colossal Jack Dempsey the colossus held up by diplomatic tape, with Yankeeland on his back, dead paradoxes spilling from his physical and cynical attitude, cynical and physical … — … punches, punches of iron, of rock, of bronze, solid, joyous, solid, sonorous, sonorous, punches that seem to collide with the negative charge of the opponent, collide, collide and fall filled with large stains, large stains of molten metal, or like statues, or like dynamos, or like motors, eternal and beautiful, bitter and vast, punches like universes, punches like cemeteries!..

As if they were thrown from the faces of volcanoes, mountains, boulders, all the pain of humanity, the icy muscles thunder over the punches of innumerable rivals; he’d say, All the faded leaves, all the faded leaves from the infinite fall onto the dark, silent mobs …

And the fighting machine smiles, like destiny when it erases a man, like destiny when it erases a man; happy EARTHQUAKE and blue CATACLYSM, Dempsey seems like life itself: he’s like this because he’s like this; and when one hundred million, one hundred million MEN applaud him beneath the stars, above the ways of the world, he smiles and smiles with the simple peace of the ruminant — at robust females, robust from their humble towns, at good vegetables, at wine, at water, at the first fruits, at the worldly tombs, at joyous meats joyous from the modest ox.

Dempsey is, perhaps, the most beastly brute of the century; what would they do, what would they do, oh!, what would they do, the beautiful doves in his strong hands?!.. die, die like the dew on the red petals of the trains; however … Jack Dempsey has the fatal beauty of the world’s rarest freaks, the world’s rarest freaks and madness …

Before the beautiful Carpentier the brute perspires, like two blind buffaloes fighting furiously with the lily of the hills …

(Carpentier!.. Carpentier!.. the DEEP voice howls, the DEEP voice howls, howls: Carpentier!.. Carpentier!.. an old shriek, dead, without head, nor face, nor sex, nor stomach, nor hands, nor legs, only with feet, only with feet, but only with feet!..!..)

They scream and shout and thrash about they scream and shout, burning, burning, multitudes of crazed multitudes …

Jack Dempsey, tall and broad, like a bull, tall and broad and INGENUOUS, like roses, innocently powerful, playing with THE BOYS AND GIRLS their children’s games, simple, simple like water and the birds of the sky, comrade of anarchists, aristocrats, the positivist bourgeoisie, dogs, cows, asses and ordinary men, Jack Dempsey, Jack Dempsey is the first light of the universe to know, BEFORE KNOWING, the initial, primordial gesture of life in prehistoric times …

*

Coney Island

Circus moons and comedic oceans, theatrical suns and solemn lands, heavens and men as a joke men and heavens, absurd reality, human reality, indignant reality, artificial and intellectual reality, humorous reality, Dionysian reality: yellow asses with dead leaves and cypresses with four legs, graves crowned with black eyes and women full of death, yellow asses with dead leaves and cypresses with four legs, skeletons that say dad, mum and make stew, and menstruating roses and girlfriends with heart, boys and girls, boys and girls, boys and girls naked, naked playing macabre love games, the elderly with lollipops, slippers, underpants or rubber bibs with ducklings, with rubber ducklings…

And everything there is happy, not like in the history of life, happy, happy with the blue happiness of the first men!..

*

New York

… noise, noise and pale men, (… noise!..), homes and homes and homes and homes with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, etc., etc., apartments, public, public and public, pain, public, public and public, petrol in things, petrol in souls, petrol in beasts, petrol and gold, gold and petrol, petrol in things, petrol in souls, petrol in beasts, petrol; it’s like this, New York, the bad, bureaucratic MACHINE; and a run of the mill, ordinary sky of the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh order, above the vast, incomplete, dead poem, dead and incomplete and the blue vanity of North American buildings …

New York, New York is like a HUGE advertisement HUGE, PHENOMENAL, UNIVERSAL, TRANSCENDENTAL stuck on the COSMOPOLITAN arse of the earth … New York!..!.. (— if you lit a match, just a match, that great commercial city would burn like a dried leaf, like a dried leaf, like a dried leaf, illuminating, by itself, the four points, the four cardinal points!..)

*

The Yankee God

Blonde and serious, clean-shaven, he says, Yes, oh yes!, yes to the cynical typists who dig like GRAVES into his TRANSCENDENTAL plans …

He’s seated in his BLUE study, work blue … blue!

– How much does it come to, in DOLLARS, for the sun, moon and stars? … just think, just think of that dark, fabulous, unlimited market of the infinite, just think of the jingling in his pockets, coins pissed out of old, dead stars … (and he smiles!) …

*

USA Company

Capital = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 DOLLARS …

— Sir, do you want OCEAN LINERS, MUMMIES, FOETUSES, men, MUMMIES, FOETUSES, men, dynamos, trains, tractors, trucks, motors, whores, maggots, automobiles, iodine, professors, Holstein or Durham cows, knowledge of hypodermic injections, honour, pure art, art bottled by us with Muslim bottles, presidents especially, especially, especially for SOUTH AMERICA, or whatever other machine, animal, product or thing? …

Write to: USA Company, USA, requesting catalogues, REQUESTING CATALOGUES, REQUESTING CATALOGUES.

***

Yankeeland the cosmic, the cosmic Yankeeland plays golf; it plays golf, plays golf with the finest ball on EARTH …

(… from the West comes the smell of agronomical essences along the roads …)

The country of slanting eyes insinuates THE PALE ROSE of a smile above the twilight of its ATTITUDE of a silly old man wise about the ways of the world; Spain, Italy, England, France, Norway, Australia, Australia, Russia, India and China slap the back of the merry American Adonis whispering to him a joke about OLD AND SKINNY neighbours, Chile gulps an enormous drink to the health of the gringo, Peru sobs while kissing his arse …

… AND THE OLD HOMES of my soul WATCH, weeping loudly, the fall of the sun — over the East! — the fall of the sun, weeping loudly!.. … …

+—+

Pablo de Rokha (1894–1968), born as Pablo Díaz Loyola, was one of the most important Chilean poets of the twentieth century. Despite his profound influence upon subsequent generations of Latin American poets, he failed to achieve the international fame of his contemporary, Pablo Neruda, with whom he quarrelled fiercely. In 1965, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile, deemed by many at the time to be long overdue. He committed suicide at the age of seventy-three.

+—+

Now part of the eponymous HBO docuseries written and directed by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a brilliant intellectual history of Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa—and the terrible myths and lies that it spawned

“A book of stunning range and near genius. . . . The catastrophic consequences of European imperialism are made palpable in the personal progress of the author, a late-twentieth-century pilgrim in Africa. Lindqvist’s astonishing connections across time and cultures, combined with a marvelous economy of prose, leave the reader appalled, reflective, and grateful.” —David Levering Lewis

“Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist’s widely acclaimed masterpiece, is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, the award-winning Swedish author takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, “Exterminate All the Brutes” exposes the roots of genocide in Africa through Lindqvist’s own journey through the Saharan desert. As he shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed the colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust.

Conquerors’ stories are the ones that inform the self-mythology of the West—whereas the lives and stories of those displaced, enslaved, or killed are too often ignored and forgotten. “Exterminate All the Brutes” forces a crucial reckoning with a past that still echoes in our collective psyche—a reckoning that compels us to acknowledge the exploitation and brutality at the heart of our modern, globalized society. As Adam Hochschild has written, “Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed.”

Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913

BY MARTÍN ESPADA

Vivas to those who have fail’d!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
—Walt Whitman

I. The Red Flag

The newspapers said the strikers would hoist

the red flag of anarchy over the silk mills

of Paterson. At the strike meeting, a dyers’ helper

from Naples rose as if from the steam of his labor,

lifted up  his hand and said here is the red flag:

brightly stained with dye for the silk of bow ties

and scarves, the skin and fingernails boiled away

for six dollars a week in the dye house.

He sat down without another word, sank back

into the fumes, name and face rubbed off

by oblivion’s thumb like a Roman coin

from the earth of his birthplace dug up

after a thousand years, as the strikers

shouted the only praise he would ever hear. 

II. The River Floods the Avenue

He was the other Valentino, not the romantic sheik

and bullfighter of silent movie palaces who died too young,

but the Valentino standing on his stoop to watch detectives

hired by the company bully strikebreakers onto a trolley

and a chorus of strikers bellowing the banned word scab.

He was not a striker or a scab, but the bullet fired to scatter

the crowd pulled the cork in the wine barrel of Valentino’s back.

His body, pale as the wings of a moth, lay beside his big-bellied wife.

Two white-veiled horses pulled the carriage to the cemetery.

Twenty thousand strikers walked behind the hearse, flooding

the avenue like the river that lit up the mills, surging around

the tombstones. Blood for blood, cried Tresca: at this signal,

thousands of hands dropped red carnations and ribbons

into the grave, till the coffin evaporated in a red sea.

III. The Insects in the Soup

Reed was a Harvard man. He wrote for the New York magazines.

Big Bill, the organizer, fixed his good eye on Reed and told him

of the strike. He stood on a tenement porch across from the mill

to escape the rain and listen to the weavers. The bluecoats

told him to move on. The Harvard man asked for a name to go

with the number on the badge, and the cops tried to unscrew

his arms from their sockets. When the judge asked his business,

Reed said: Poet. The judge said: Twenty days in the county jail.

Reed was a Harvard man. He taught the strikers Harvard songs,

the tunes to sing with rebel words at the gates of the mill. The strikers

taught him how to spot the insects in the soup, speaking in tongues

the gospel of One Big Union and the eight-hour day, cramming the jail

till the weary jailers had to unlock the doors. Reed would write:

There’s war in Paterson. After it was over, he rode with Pancho Villa.

IV. The Little Agitator

The cops on horseback charged into the picket line.

The weavers raised their hands across their faces,

hands that knew the loom as their fathers’ hands

knew the loom, and the billy clubs broke their fingers.

Hannah was seventeen, the captain of the picket line,

the Joan of Arc of the Silk Strike. The prosecutor called her

a little agitator. Shame, said the judge; if she picketed again,

he would ship her to the State Home for Girls in Trenton.

Hannah left the courthouse to picket the mill. She chased

a strikebreaker down the street, yelling in Yidish the word

for shame. Back in court, she hissed at the judge’s sentence

of another striker. Hannah got twenty days in jail for hissing.

She sang all the way to jail. After the strike came the blacklist,

the counter at her husband’s candy store, the words for shame.

V. Vivas to Those Who Have Failed

Strikers without shoes lose strikes. Twenty years after the weavers

and dyers’ helpers returned hollow-eyed to the loom and the steam,

Mazziotti led the other silk mill workers marching down the avenue

in Paterson, singing the old union songs for five cents more an hour.

Once again the nightsticks cracked cheekbones like teacups.

Mazziotti pressed both hands to his head, squeezing red ribbons

from his scalp. There would be no buffalo nickel for an hour’s work

at the mill, for the silk of bow ties and scarves. Skull remembered wood.

The brain thrown against the wall of the skull remembered too:

the Sons of Italy, the Workmen’s Circle, Local 152, Industrial

Workers of the World, one-eyed Big Bill and Flynn the Rebel Girl

speaking in tongues to thousands the prophecy of an eight-hour day.

Mazziotti’s son would become a doctor, his daughter a poet.

Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river.

Martin Espada, “Vivas To Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913” from Vivas To Those Who Have Failed. Copyright © 2015 by Martin Espada.  Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc..

+—+

Ghazal, After Ferguson

BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Somebody go & ask Biggie to orate

what’s going down in the streets.

No, an attitude is not a suicide note

written on walls around the streets.

Twitter stays lockstep in the frontal lobe

as we hope for a bypass beyond the streets,

but only each day bears witness

in the echo chamber of the streets.

Grandmaster Flash’s thunderclap says

he’s not the grand jury in the streets,

says he doesn’t care if you’re big or small

fear can kill a man on the streets.

Take back the night. Take killjoy’s

cameras & microphones to the streets.

If you’re holding the hand lightning strikes

juice will light you up miles from the streets

where an electric chair surge dims

all the county lights beyond the streets.

Who will go out there & speak laws

of motion & relativity in the streets?

Yusef, this morning proves a crow

the only truth serum in the street.

Yusef Komunyakaa, “Ghazal, After Ferguson” from The Emperor of Water Clocks. Copyright © 2015 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. http://us.macmillan.com/fsg

Source: The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015)

+—+

Riot

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

A riot is the language of the unheard.
—martin luther king

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Riot” from Blacks. Copyright © 1994 by Gwendolyn Brooks.  Reprinted by permission of Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Source: Riot (Broadside Press, 1969)

+—+

ICE Agents Storm My Porch

BY MARIA MELENDEZ KELSON

The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth

are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit.

“Open up!” they bellow,

hands quiet before my door

that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway.

You can’t do it, I squeak from inside.

You can’t make me feel at home here

in this time of siege for me and mine, mi raza.

Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy

is now a permanent resident in my gut.

“Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear,

striding up to my table

to juice me a glass of pink nectar.

They’ve brought welcome baskets

stuffed with proof I’m earthling.

From under a gingham cover,

I tug a dark feather

iridescing green — cohering

to “magpie” thought,

to memory’s chatter,

to mind. Mine.

And here they have my mind translated

into a slate-surfaced pond, which

vibrates in the shape

of a cottonwood’s autumn molt,

which trees me to dirt, which soils me

heat & freeze —

But you’ll always be

one definitive document short! I complain.

Doubts can forever outstrip

your geo-logic.

For which they produce

a lock of my natal dust,

bronzed

to the fluttering fiber

of lacebark pine.

Where’d they get that stuff?

The baskets are bottomless,

and it’s useless for me to insist

on being distinct.

Undergoing re-portation,

I’m awakened to a Center,

where walls

between all beings

are dreamt to dissolve.

+—+

RE: Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment