BUT ON PAPER, THINGS CAN LIVE
FOREVER.
ON PAPER, A BUTTERFLY NEVER DIES.
Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down was somebody's wife
i wanted to overthrow the government but all i brought down
was somebody's wife
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses and one fox
and look here, they write,
you are a dupe for the state, the church,
you are in the ego-dream,
read your history, study the monetary system,
note that the racial war is 23,000 years old.
well, I remember 20 years ago, sitting with an old Jewish
tailor,
his nose in the lamplight like a cannon sighted on the enemy;
and
there was an Italian pharmacist who lived in an expensive
apartment
in the best part of town; we plotted to overthrow
a tottering dynasty, the tailor sewing buttons on a vest,
the Italian poking his cigar in my eye, lighting me up,
a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,
well-read, starving, depressed, but actually
a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,
but I didn’t know this; I listened to my Italian and my Jew
and I went out down dark alleys smoking borrowed cigarettes
and watching the backs of houses come down in flames,
but somewhere we missed: we were not men enough,
large or small
enough,
or we only wanted to talk or we were bored, so the anarchy
fell through,
and the Jew died and the Italian grew angry because I stayed
with his
wife when he went down to the pharmacy; he did not care to
have
his personal government overthrown, and she overthrew easy,
and
I had some guilt: the children were asleep in the other
bedroom
but later I won $200 in a crap game and took a bus to New
Orleans
and I stood on the corner listening to the music coming from
bars
and then I went inside to the bars,
and I sat there thinking about the dead Jew,
how all he did was sew on buttons and talk,
and how he gave way although he was stronger than any of us
he gave way because his bladder would not go on,
and maybe that saved Wall Street and Manhattan
and the Church and Central Park West and Rome and the
Left Bank, but the pharmacist’s wife, she was nice,
she was tired of bombs under the pillow and hissing the Pope,
and she had a very nice figure, very good legs,
but I guess she felt as I: that the weakness was not
Government
but Man, one at a time, that men were never as strong as
their ideas
and that ideas were governments turned into men;
and so it began on a couch with a spilled martini
and it ended in the bedroom: desire, revolution,
nonsense ended, and the shades rattled in the wind,
rattled like sabers, cracked like cannon,
and 30 dogs, 20 men on 20 horses chased one fox
across the fields under the sun,
and I got out of bed and yawned and scratched my belly
and knew that soon
very soon I would have to get
very drunk again.
"I wanted to overthrow the government but all I brought
down was somebody's wife" from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame:
Selected Poems 1955-1973 by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965,
1966, 1967, 1968, 1974 by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Burning in Water Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems
from 1955-1973 (Black Sparrow Press, 1996)
Word origins
The French word bouquiniste, meaning a book or a little book is pronounced “Boo-Ki-Nest and from that, we get the term for a dealer in old and rare books.
But in reading great literature /Quite from C.S. Lewis
But in reading great
literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.
C.S. Lewis
Word origins
The word Opusculum comes from Latin, where it serves as the diminutive form
of the noun opus, meaning "work." In English, opus can refer to any
literary or artistic work, though it often specifically refers to a musical
piece. Being a diminutive of opus, opusculum logically refers to a short or
minor work. Unlike its more famous relation, however, opusculum is most often
used for literary works. The Latin plural of opus is opera, which gave us (via
Italian) the word we know for a musical production consisting primarily of
vocal pieces performed with orchestral accompaniment.
Despot: A ruler
with absolute power and authority/one exercising power tyrannically: a person
exercising absolute power in a brutal or oppressive way. In the past, the word
was mainly used to identify some very specific rulers or religious officials,
and the title was an honorable one: it comes from a Greek word meaning
"lord" or "master" and was originally applied to deities.
That situation changed toward the end of the century, perhaps because of French
Revolutionists, who were said to have been "very liberal in conferring
this title," considered all sovereigns to be tyrannical. When democracy
became all the rage, despot came to be used most often for any ruler who
wielded absolute and often contemptuous and oppressive power.
The word head is from Old English heafod (top of the body).
Jell-O: The
word gelatin (a substance formed by boiling bones, skin, ligaments, etc.) is
from Latin gelare (to freeze). Ultimately from the Indo-European root gel-
(cold; to freeze), which also gave us jelly, chill, glacier, cold, and congeal.
Earliest documented use: 1935.
Parthian. Relating
to, or characteristic of ancient Parthia or its people./ Or having the effect
of a shot fired while in real or feigned retreat. The adjective Parthian, which often shows up
in the phrase "Parthian shot," has its roots in the military
strategies of the ancient Parthians. One of the fighting maneuvers of Parthian
horsemen was to discharge arrows while in real or feigned retreat. The maneuver
must have been memorable because "Parthian shot" continues to be used
for a "parting shot," or a cutting remark made by a person who is leaving,
many centuries after the dissolution of the Parthian empire.
Bone is from Old
English ban (bone)
Good fiction creates empathy.
Good fiction creates empathy. A
novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another
person, to live another life. -Barbara
Kingsolver, novelist, essayist, and poet.
Words origins
Sashay: From the French word chassé,
meaning "to chase." The word worked
its way into English, badly mispronounced as Sashay.
Words (That's F. Scott Fitzgerald in the film below)
Pelf: noun: Money or wealth, especially when acquired in a dishonorable manner. From Old French pelfre (booty), which also gave us the word pilfer.
Word origins Polyglot
Polyglot: Speaking or writing several languages: multilingual. The prefix poly comes from Greek and means "many" or "multi-." Glot comes from the Greek term glōtta, meaning "language" or "tongue." (Glōtta is also the source of glottis, the word for the space between the vocal cords.)
The French word étiquette means "ticket" or "label attached to something for identification." In 16th-century Spain, the French word was borrowed (and altered to etiqueta) to refer to the written protocols describing orders of precedence and behavior demanded of those who appeared at court. Eventually, etiqueta came to be applied to the court ceremonies themselves as well as the documents which outlined the requirements for them. Interestingly, this then led to French speakers of the time attributing the second sense of "proper behavior" to their étiquette, and in the middle of the 18th century English speakers finally adopted both the word and the second meaning from the French
A poem by Richard Brautigan
Kafka’s Hat
With
the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka’s hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard
Brautigan
Take notice/ Kurt Vonnegut
Despite his success later in life, Kurt Vonnegut marched through some awful times in his life, including being forced to search and bury the dead after the bombing of Dresden. So when he wrote this, he wasn’t just some guy trying to fill space.
Poet Li-Young Lee: From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee (born August 19, 1957) is an
American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His
maternal great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President
who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal
physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia,
where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959 the Lee family fled
Indonesia to escape widespread anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year
trek through Hong Kong and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964.
Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona,
and the State University of New York at Brockport.
From Blossoms
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
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