Newness. The Internet is infatuated with The New. A story from 6 years ago, however prescient or insightful on its subject matter, is typically treated like a doddering, blathering old fart at the nursing home, basking in memories of its golden days.
My plan to create a new web site runs into the usual constipations. If I had even one other person to do this with, someone (needless to say) with an equal interest in the project and the proper skillset to team up with me, it could make things happen so much faster. For me the death in the details is in the technical considerations, and to a lesser extent the design. I am no designer, and only a rung above a thrashing hack when it comes to writing real code. But I can get it done on the latter. On the former I just have to get lucky.
Today’s motivations to get the site going stopped with uncertainty about the favicon items, and how I can be sure to serve only the desired icon on one site, when there are dozens of sites on this WordPress multisite. I may not need or want to stay with the multisite but for now I will delude myself with the notion that there was value in the gut-wrenching days I spent getting that spectacularly badly-documented piece of shit to just fucking work. Then there are the other lingering matters of improving the backup so that it is 100% automated and I don’t occasionally go *gulp* at the possibility that the ftp backup server overflowed.
It would be a better world for me if all I thought about was content and ideas. But it is not to be, at least not this iteration of my ever-chaptering life.
The story, “CUNT”, I don’t know how lengthy to make it.The opening salvo is a sealed deal. The 6th grade, the bus, the other kids whispering a word I’d never heard, talking about something I’d never seen and the significance of which I didn’t understand.
Ah, but wait, another memory, which could be verified through timeline constructs. 10th Grade (I think) all the other guys could talk about was Pia Zadora’s cunt. I only barely saw it, in the library of all places. Someone had whatever magazine she was in. I seem to remember it being Oui but that could be off. I saw that image of her for just a second before a nun librarian snatched (hehehe) it away from whoever was holding it. Pia was on her knees on a beach, I think, looking at me, and I barely caught a glimpse of it. Compared to the “Hustler” cunt hers looked like a glorious promised land.
Between the “Hustler” on the bus and Pia Zadora in the 10th grade I saw it infrequently. Hard core porn was the stuff of you got from shirtless toothpick gnawing hillbillies selling their goods out of aluminum shacks in unincorporated parts of Florida. I never saw that stuff until college, and the impressions it made on me were all over the place. Some of it was disgusting, other of it I could not erase from my mind for years after seeing it. One night, during freshman year of college, I both smoked pot and saw all-out XXX porn for the first time. The images of cocks entering women’s vaginas and women sucking cock was like a ludicrous, dystopian carnival of behaviours, some of which I had imagined on my own without any education or lectures on how sex worked; others were bizarre and new to me.
…
OK, I need to slow down on this. I want the story to be reasonably succinct. Suck Synced. There’s a backup app for your pr0n: SuckSynced. “Dude, did you SuckSync the blowjob videos?” “Naw, man, I screwed up. SickSunk it…”
Yeah.
Listening now to Philip Glass, from the North Star album. A friend who knows of my interest in Glass wrote to ask if I’d heard of the then-upcoming premiere of a Glass Symphony at Carnegie Hall on the occasion of the composer’s 80th birthday. It was January 31, the day after my birthday, which occurred 31 years earlier. I did in fact get a card from Carnegie Hall a couple of months earlier announcing the premiere. I laughed a bit, wondering if this was going to be Glass’ 412th Symphony. In fact it was his 11th. I don’t know how the event went. I dig a lot of his music, but do not need the atmosphere of a concert hall to experience it in a more elevated sensory environment.
The thing about Glass is that as much as I admire and connect with certain of his scores you just cannot look at the entirety of his output without reaching the obvious conclusion: he never evolved. This Philip Glass “North Star” album I am listening to sounds like the same Philip Glass who wrote the 5th String Quartet however many years earlier. Maybe evolution is not a fair standard against which to measure a composer’s mettle, but early Beethoven is unrecognizable compared to the later. Same could be said for Liszt, who is not as great a composer but whose industriousness left enough output to assess his evolutions. J.S.Bach, one might hazard, evolved only incrementally. But his was a different time, and his output was the stuff of liturgical piety.
It is a debate I am not altogether ready to embark upon with myself, having not absorbed Glass’ lesser-known output in a while. At the moment I have switched to his “Concerto Fantasy for Two Tympanis”. Its unusual choice for soloists notwithstanding the music sounds like just another Philip Glass Joint.
…
Random book of the hour is “The Warmth Of Our Suns. The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” That looks like something I would never finish. It is by Isabel Wilkerson. It won some award.
Opening to page 181 presents a couple of poetry excerpts on the subject of EXODUS. That seems appropriate to the theme of this tome. One excerpt is from The Cleveland Advocate, another from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices.
Page 207 describes the attempt of Robert, a black man, to find a motel room. The motel owners (presumably white) politely inform Robert that they just booked their last room. Robert notices that one of them “the face was awkward, trying to be loose and matter of fact.”
Page 61 includes a few paragraphs about the lynching of Claude Neal in 1934. Outraged as some people were Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose not to alienate his southern voters by taking visible umbrage against the events. That’s all I get from page 61, though I had to backtrack some to pick up Mr. Neal’s first name.
This should go in the “About” section of the new site, as regards picking up random books and opening to certain pages. I did not do it last time but I should have. I open to pages 61, 181, and 207, assuming such pages exist. 181 is my PO Box address and magic numbers for a variety of reasons, from happy coincidences to the randomness of things. 61 was the opus number of Chopin’s “Polonaise-Fantaisie”, the piece I pursued from the 8th grade on and would eventually use for college conservatory auditions before giving up on it altogether. Despite its bold strokes I find it is a frail piece, held together like a house made of popsicle sticks. 207 was my winning time in an 8th grade track and field event. I don’t remember what the event was but for the few moments I held the record I was in the club, getting handshakes and high fives from the vaunted athletes whose reputations would become immortal at that school (as described yesterday). Just as I was digging in to Chopin’s Op. 61 I also made my mark with 2:07. On this account the two numbers have always been inextricably linked in my mind. When I did my first radio interview in New York (it was with a Kiwi network) I did not want to hear the broadcast, which dealt with subjects of suicide, depression, and the Apology Line (heh). The producer nevertheless asked if I wanted a cassette tape of the broadcast. I asked him to send it to 207 East 61st Street, an address I once aspired to as my dream destination but which I don’t think would suit me now as a growed up.
Yeah, I know, I’ve talked on all this before. Just limbering up my mind again to revisit and remember how and why I consistently keep that backstory in my vernacular. Today’s random book pages touch on tiny anecdotes from a story too big to delve into or to use as a springboard. Yesterday’s mention of a fictional drone attack on a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery was enough to remind me that I had a chance, or would have had a chance had I known she was buried there, to see my grade school English teacher, Ruth Allyn, who is buried there.
I remembered walking over here how the discovery that she was there drew a sad surprise from me. No real surprise that she had passed but sadness that it took as many years to learn of it. She was a bit of a rebel, I thought, among the other teachers. Maybe it was her advanced age compared to the others, or simply her attitude about things. She would read my stories aloud to the other teachers in their break room. One of the other teachers told my mother this, then quickly demurred, saying that maybe she wasn’t supposed to have reveled this little secret.
Wow, it is 3:20 already. I have to pee too badly to do a spellcheck right now.
