Written in the 70s — Sontag: When suffering

Posted on April 18, 2018 by JMN

Sontag: “When suffering and pleasure are experienced vicariously, people can afford to be intense.” [Porno]
Excessive susceptibility to the visual; is this the most “intellectual” of the senses?
Ortega: “La dirección en que el ver va diferenciándose del palpar consiste en estas dos notas: el alejamiento progresivo del objeto que hiere el sentido y el irse convirtiendo ese objeto en puro color… En rigor, las cosas que hay detrás de los colores no le interesan.”
The need for visual stimulus denotes inhibitedness or deficient sensuality (defective sexuality).
The imagination: porno = fairytale. Healthy realization of fantasies.
Datum: It’s more fun to watch than to do the acts portrayed.
Datum: It’s hard to envisage exotic sex with persons one knows fairly well (and likes?).

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

70s-8

Written in the 70s, 70s-8. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Written in the 70s — We’ll have sex

Posted on April 18, 2018 by JMN

… We’ll have sex if you love me. Or: We’ve had sex; how can you not love me? Or: We love each other; let’s marry so we can close the deal in bed. Or: My self-respect is so down; I can’t risk having sex and then your pulling out.
My verse failed insofar as it tried to “express” me and my personal history. The advice: “Get more emotion!” was non-productive or even obstructive, maybe because of the false way I understood and tried to implement it. It caused me to delve into the past and try to
locate things I could feel strongly about; then to try to construct poems around those feelings. I was dead to the past.
Sontag’s emphasis on form as content, source of emotional power, seems more pertinent. *Essay on Bresson.*

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

70s-7a

Written in the 70s, 70s-7a. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Written in the 70s — Abstraction

Posted on April 18, 2018 by JMN
70s-7

Written in the 70s, 70s-7. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

Abstraction: flight from interpretation: return the sensual to art (music as well).
The person who violently and persistently jars his senses with drugs, sex, food, is the opposite of voluptuous; he is frigid. The capacity for sensuality is in inverse proportion to the power of the stimuli needed to experience pleasure. The sybarite is impotent, the ascetic a voluptuary.
A negative effect of graduate school was disenchantment with critical thought. The effort to write engendered a silly disdain of ideas and analytical process.
How easily he surrenders to games. Ambition retires to the courts.
The insertion of beads…
Sex is the currency of exchange in most sentimental transactions: I love you;

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“Man Speaking”

Posted on April 18, 2018 by JMN

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Man speaking.

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“Whoosh… Boom”

Posted on April 18, 2018 by JMN

“We went and executed that against real targets with real missiles, and quite simply, we won. So from a practice standpoint, they saw it. So there’s a level of, in their hearts, it’s no longer, hey, trust us, this will work. They heard the missile go whoosh, they saw it go boom… One winning tactic that seemed to emerge was an aggressive, forward US Navy presence with ships and aircraft pushing the limit and going over the horizon to bring the heat to the adversary force.”

(US Navy Capt. Joe Cahill, commanding officer of the USS Bunker Hill, quoted by Alex Lockie, Business Insider, 4-3-18)

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From Memory

Posted on April 17, 2018 by JMN

“September 1, 1939,” poem by W. H. Auden, https://www.poets.org

This is the longest poem I’ve memorized so far. It has nine stanzas, each of which has eleven lines. There’s a regular rhyme scheme. I detect a three-beat cadence. I read somewhere that Auden repudiated this poem in later life, but I have an affection for it. It speaks not only to his moment but, eerily, to ours as well.

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The Carper

Posted on April 17, 2018 by JMN

“Eldest Trump sons jet to Dubai for lavish wedding” (CNN, 4-13-18).
The plural “sons” is off. “Eldest” is superlative — there can only be one. “Older Trump sons…” would have been better to distinguish the grown two from their half-sibling teen. And is “lavish” necessary? Since when do rich people jet around the globe to any wedding that’s not lavish? Res ipsa loquitur.

“NASA Captured 3D Scans of Jupiter’s Cyclones And They’re Terrifyingly Awesome” (The Daily Caller, 4-14-18).
Frighteningly scary is how “awesome” has lost its “awe” part and has to be punched up with an adverb.

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This Is Stag Country

Posted on April 17, 2018 by JMN

Mallory and Chess Peavy had their twins, Heather and Feather, when Chess was a senior and Mallory was a sophomore. Jester and Kincaid wanted Chess to get an Associate’s in Kinesiology from Blane so he could coach at the District, but you know kids. Kenny Barfield, the JP, married them in his house. The commode had overflowed at the Precinct.

Sturgis McElroy got Chess a Tom’s Toasted Snacks route. He finally got on at the District, but in maintenance, not coaching. By then, Heather and Feather were in preschool. Rodeo, their third, was one-and-a-half, and stayed a lot with his grandmomma.

After Rodeo came, Mallory dropped out of school again and got on at Mustang Mart checking groceries. She’s pregnant with Bliss now, and having trouble staying on her feet for long periods. She wants to home-school the twins after she gets her GED. I hope she can get a sit-down job. Even after Bliss is born, she’ll have trouble standing for very long, what with that little bit of weight she’s picked up.

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Social Math — UK

Posted on April 17, 2018 by JMN

Felicity and her friend Nigella depart Felicity’s family’s thirty-two-room summer house in order to meet Giles and Trevor for high tea at the Chancery Buttery near Vauxhall Mews. Their chauffeured Bentley will traverse the twenty-seven kilometres at an average rate of 47.3 kilometres per hour. At kilometre two the following exchange takes place:

Felicity: “That hat is so last season. Did your mum fob it off on you?”

Nigella: “No, dear, it’s Harrod’s Fourth Floor, actually. You won’t find this design at that dreary milliner’s on the mezzanine. Oh, I’m sorry! You shop there, do you not?”

Question: What distance does the Bentley travel during the 18 minutes of silence that ensue?

(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Social Math — UK

Posted on April 17, 2018 by JMN

Towne Crier
Chichesterton-Upon-Hogmill
URGENT BULLETIN

Instances of petty theft in Chichesterton-Upon-Hogmill have been remarked upon by our readers for a second fortnight.

Be so kind as to report to the Constabulary the presence of any persons of dubious aspect, howsoever benign-seeming, whom you may spy lurking about in public spaces.

Make no mistake: A “mother” dandling her infant may disguise a larcenous proclivity endemic, be it said in passing, to the inferior classes. Monitor your servants for unaccustomed bedizenment betokening an unearned windfall. The fair wages you pay do not support frippery.

Vigilance, Eminent Citizens! It’s the cross that privilege bears.

Faithfully,
Your Editor
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved. )

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