Charles Bukowski - "the bluebird"

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be sad.

then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Charles Bukowski - "the word"

there was Auden, I don't remember
which small room I first read him
in
and there was Spender and I don't
know which small room
either
and then there was Ezra
and I remember that room
there was a torn screen
that the flies came through
and it was Los Angeles
and the woman said to me,
"Jesus Christ, you reading those
Cantos again!"
she liked e. e. cummings, though,
she thought he was really
good and she was
right.

I remember when I read Turgenev,
though, I had just come out of the
drunk tank and I was living
alone
and I thought he was really a
subtle and funny son of a
bitch.

Hemingway I read everywhere,
sometimes a few times over
and he made me feel brave
and tough
until one day
it all just stopped cold for me
and worse than that,
Ernie became an
irritant.

My Jeffers period was sometime
in Los Angeles, some room, some
job,
the same woman was back
and she said,
"Jesus, how can you read this
crap?"
one time when she was gone
I found many magazines
under the bed.
I pulled them out
and found that the contents were
all about murder
and it was all about women
who were tortured, killed,
dismembered and so
forth with the
lurid photos
in black and
white.
that stuff wasn't for
me.

my first encounter with Henry
Miller was via paperback
on a bus through Arizona.
he was great when he stuck
to reality
but when he got ethereal
when he got to philosophizing
he got as dry and boring as
the passing
landscape.
I left him in the men's crapper
at a hamburger
stop.

I got hold of Celine's Journey
and read it straight through
while in bed eating crackers.
I kept reading, eating the
crackers and reading, reading,
laughing out loud,
thinking, at last I've met a man
who writes better than
I.
I finished the book and then
drank much water.
the crackers swelled up
inside of me
and I got the worst
god damned stomach
ache of my
life.

I was living with my first
wife.
she worked for the L.A.
Sheriff's Dept.
and she came in to
find me doubled up
and moaning.

"Oh, what happened?"

"I've just read the world's
greatest
writers!"

"But you said you were."

"I'm second, baby . . ."

I read F. D.'s Notes from the
Underground
in a small El Paso
library
after sleeping the night
on a park bench
during a sand
storm.
after reading that book
I knew I had a long way
to go as a
writer.

I don't know where I read
T. S. Eliot.
he made a small dent
which soon ironed
out.

there were many rooms,
many books,
D. H. Lawrence, Gorky,
A. Huxley, Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair Lewis,
James Thurber, Dos Passos,
etc
Kafka.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Rabelais.
Hamsun.

as a very young man
I worked as a shipping clerk,
made the bars at night,
came into the roominghouse,
went to bed
and read the
books.
 I had 3 or 4 of them in
bed with me (what a
man!) and then I would
sleep.

my landlady finally told
me, "You know, you read those
books in bed and about every
hour or so one of them will
fall to the floor.
You are keeping everybody
awake!"

(I was on the 3rd floor.)

what days and nights those
were.

now I can't read anything,
not even the newspaper.
and, of course, I can't watch
tv except for the boxing
matches.
I do hear some news
on the car radio
while driving the freeway
and waiting for the
traffic
reports.

but you know, by former
life as a bibliophile, it
possibly kept me from
murdering somebody,
myself
included.
it kept me from being an
industrialist.
it allowed me to endure
some women
that most men would never
be able to live
with.
it gave me space, a
pause.
it helped me to write
this.

(in this room,
like the other rooms)

perhaps for some young man
now
needing
to laugh at the
impossibilities
which are here
always
after we are
not.

Platoon (1986)

Another impressive war film, Oliver Stone, Charlie Sheen, a very tiny role for Johnny Depp.

The madness? It is there.
The ruthless Hollywood optimism? Also, slightly so, but I must admit I feel like mr Stone added that because he desperately wants to believe in it. Like the soldier almost going home, three days before R&R, has a bad feeling, thus was this film to him.

What is it with me and war movies lately? I still want to watch Full Metal Jacket (again). And feel like watching Apocalypse Now over and over again. Platoon was good, but it does not match up to Coppola's masterpiece. Is it the intensity of the madness? The plunge? Too slick?

Night Beats - "Puppet on a String" (Night Beats)

A very Cramps psycho/rockabilly 60's sound, but this album is actually from 2011.

Natalia Kills - "Problem"

Not my kind of song, bit like Britney Spears' "Toxic" but kinda fun.

Perhaps just because of the line "don't you want to save this dirty little damsel"

Aymara language and the idea of time

Linguistic and gestural analysis by Núñez and Sweetser also asserts that the Aymara have an apparently unique, or at least very rare, understanding of time, and Aymara is, with Quechua, one of very few languages where speakers seem to represent the past as in front of them and the future as behind them. Their argument is situated mainly within the framework of conceptual metaphor, which recognizes in general two subtypes of the metaphor "the passage of time is motion": one is "time passing is motion over a landscape" (or "moving-ego"), and the other is "time passing is a moving object" ("moving-events"). The latter metaphor does not explicitly involve the individual/speaker; events are in a queue, with prior events towards the front of the line. The individual may be facing the queue, or it may be moving from left to right in front of him/her.
The claims regarding Aymara involve the moving-ego metaphor. Most languages conceptualize the ego as moving forward into the future, with ego's back to the past. The English sentences prepare for what lies before us and we are facing a prosperous future exemplify this metaphor. In contrast, Aymara seems to encode the past as in front of individuals, and the future in back; this is typologically a rare phenomenon.
The fact that English has words like before and after that are (currently or archaically) polysemous between 'front/earlier' or 'back/later' may seem to refute the claims regarding Aymara uniqueness. However, these words relate events to other events, i.e., are part of the moving-events metaphor. In fact, when before means in front of ego, it can only mean future. For instance, our future is laid out before us while our past is behind us. Parallel Aymara examples describe future days as "qhipa uru", literally 'back days', and these are sometimes accompanied by gestures to behind the speaker. The same applies to Quechua speakers, whose expression "qhipa p'unchaw" corresponds directly to Aymara "qhipa uru". Possibly, the metaphor is that the past is visible to us (in front of our eyes), while the future is not.