--because it really isn't good enough to get such a title. Sort of musing on writer's block in a couple of these. Hope I'm not wasting your time because that would be a damn shame, but I guess I can still sit back on the fact that the blog is located at Sorry for Boring You.
"my worst nightmare"
Prose is an odd thing
where you come in with a thought process
and then these people show up
--these characters--
and usually
in my experience
they tell you what
they're going to do.
Vonnegut would have me
play the sadist
and not waste the reader's time
with pleasantries
like good things
happening
to
good people.
So's anyway
I tried to write this story
about what I imagined
as the worst thing that could ever happen to me
and then things changed,
and suddenly I really wasn't writing about myself
but someone more interesting
and I couldn't just beat this person
I had created
to a pulp.
I'm a failure when it comes to writing
pretty much anything
that you'll want to read on rainy days
and that's not nearly the only thing
I'm a failure at.
I know these truths to be self-evident.
But four score and seven years from now,
maybe I'll be somewhere proud of something that I did one time.
"Ants and Uncles"
When Carl was in
third grade
he spent way too much time
with an hourglass
out in his backyard
burning ants with sunlight.
For some reason
this recurs to him
that summer before going
back to the campus.
This was the year
he really hit it off with that one girl
who went to junior high
with your brother,
you remember?
So anyway,
this guy, Carl,
we met in a poetry class
in 2018
and he told me that his uncle
was also named Andy
and he invited me to this show
and this one time we both got so stoned
that we may have been unable to move for up to three hours.
I learned from him
that my anger was not something to be ashamed about
and we didn't Brad Pitt it up under some restaurant somewhere
but we hit walls once in a while,
so I guess I'm trying to say
girl,
last night
when I said,
I'm too much of a monster
to be in a relationship with you
that was just the paranoia talking
and I really hope you get this phone message before you screw your psychiatrist.
"walking"
Staring at a computer screen is so unproductive.
Did you know
that the writer
actually gets most of his ideas
these days
when he's walking around campus
in his tight ass shoes,
headphones in,
mind elsewhere?
You can blame
his periods
of inspiration's block--
where his preset
goals for writing
suddenly corrode
into shit--
on the fact
that he's not getting out of his house
often enough.
"Citizenry"
Poets
everywhere
please explain
in three paragraphs or less
what you are.
Plato would have you thrown out of his state
and DeLillo says that the novelist is the bad citizen
so that one's taken.
What are your goals in life?
Your occupation, please,
for it can be easily misunderstood.
Plus what can stop
any old kid
who's broken up with a lover
from putting on sunglasses,
skipping classes
and saying
"I'm a poet"?
Good night, folks, have a happy rest-of-the-weekend and try to realize when you are happy. Vonnegut would want us to.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Everyone's an ocean drowning.
1:53AM OFF DAY
I offer you this rubbish of an attempt here. One thing about writing is that you can tell when it's off. I figure that best case scenario I just have one more of these days late in the month and then take off the 28th and still have 100 poems. Well. We'll see.
1:26AM
Still thinking about the poems for today. Blog is set in Pacific time, I think, so I have 90 minutes, but we'll see. Might put in some off days for the month, since four poems times 28 equals 112 and that's more than the goal. Don't like the idea about doing something like that right now though. Too early. So, what have you, I'll try to spin something together. Shit. I guess I'll just do book reviews. Apologies to people looking for quality, I'm doing this the Golden Corral way, quantity being me important. :~)
"Rules"
Second time through
and you get every joke
because this is a novel about
people who don't really want to admit
that they're twenty yet
but are dangerously close
to not being able to hide
that fact anymore.
You are less than zero
when you haven't really
realized that this
isn't high school anymore.
But this other book
is about when your fear stemming
from that realization
has become a cynicism that will haunt you to the grave.
Currently rereading THE RULES OF ATTRACTION if that wasn't obvious enough to you from the poem.
"Holden"
I just don't what to think of you,
man,
it sort of kills me
how everyone thinks
that each new book
is you again, speaking to us for a bit more.
And it's not fair
to judge on the fact
that book reviewers are a very lazy people,
but you do have big britches
which I'm sure you would find beneficial
for the next time you take a girl to the backseat of your car.
Your writer
just died a while back,
but his story is quite the odd one,
because it seems that once he wrote you,
he left this world
and you became the real one.
Reading THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Just musing on the first third to half of the book so far. Holden is everywhere these days, so it's probably a good idea that I'm finally reading it. I mean from MDC to Jake Gyllenhaal movies, this kid does it all!
I offer you this rubbish of an attempt here. One thing about writing is that you can tell when it's off. I figure that best case scenario I just have one more of these days late in the month and then take off the 28th and still have 100 poems. Well. We'll see.
1:26AM
Still thinking about the poems for today. Blog is set in Pacific time, I think, so I have 90 minutes, but we'll see. Might put in some off days for the month, since four poems times 28 equals 112 and that's more than the goal. Don't like the idea about doing something like that right now though. Too early. So, what have you, I'll try to spin something together. Shit. I guess I'll just do book reviews. Apologies to people looking for quality, I'm doing this the Golden Corral way, quantity being me important. :~)
"Rules"
Second time through
and you get every joke
because this is a novel about
people who don't really want to admit
that they're twenty yet
but are dangerously close
to not being able to hide
that fact anymore.
You are less than zero
when you haven't really
realized that this
isn't high school anymore.
But this other book
is about when your fear stemming
from that realization
has become a cynicism that will haunt you to the grave.
Currently rereading THE RULES OF ATTRACTION if that wasn't obvious enough to you from the poem.
"Holden"
I just don't what to think of you,
man,
it sort of kills me
how everyone thinks
that each new book
is you again, speaking to us for a bit more.
And it's not fair
to judge on the fact
that book reviewers are a very lazy people,
but you do have big britches
which I'm sure you would find beneficial
for the next time you take a girl to the backseat of your car.
Your writer
just died a while back,
but his story is quite the odd one,
because it seems that once he wrote you,
he left this world
and you became the real one.
Reading THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Just musing on the first third to half of the book so far. Holden is everywhere these days, so it's probably a good idea that I'm finally reading it. I mean from MDC to Jake Gyllenhaal movies, this kid does it all!
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Epics and Fictions
Bit of weirdness today. I've been figuring out my view on poetry lately--an important distinction that I have made (for my writing at least) is between fictional poetry, where I'm putting on some form of mask, and, well, I guess I'd refer to it as something like "normal" poetry for lack of a better word. This set of poems has elements of both I guess. Along with this thought, I should add that the character of "Andy" may appear in one or more of the poems in this centennial set and I somewhat see this person as my poetic alter-ego. Err...enough with me talking at you...Wait, first I should mention that this set ends in an epic. 77 lines. I think it's sort of worth it though.
"Replacements"
The perfect mate
will always be there for your rainy days
and can make you happy no matter what.
The perfect mate
quickly ends every argument
by accepting all blame.
The perfect mate
will only join you in bed
and never has you up at night worried.
The perfect mate
knows every thought you have
but is not jealous or pushy or anything like that.
The perfect mate
is grown
in the oceans of Ganymede,
gender is chosen approximately
three weeks after germination,
but only by specifications of the future owner.
It sells for $49.95 plus processing & handling
and you should not accept
any imitators--
this is the real deal
offered now in our limited time offer.
Please allow about a month and a half for shipping.
"Regulations of Window-shopping"
Stare at the tops of the stores in the mall
and you can still see people to avoid them,
but do not have to deal with eye contact.
Walk quickly.
Regard nothing with enough thought
so as to create a new memory.
You are just a spoiled
young man
--really just a boy--
scared by his own anger
and converting it to work
into joules
that you are burning
with each step.
Do not run
or otherwise draw attention to yourself
and don't speak.
In fact
please stop this inner monologue.
"Lunacy"
Listening
to the sounds
of Henry
playing his electric piano
with headphones in
is a bit like a dissection
and this guy's going to be a doctor
so
it sort of makes some sense,
don't you think?
Now
on five hours of sleep last night
I can barely stand
so maybe I'm only being floored
by ordinary thoughts
but my mind
is telling me,
"Andy, now,
remember this moment.
There's something here."
Billy Joel playing in the background
is important
and these people I know--
I know I'm making horrible connections
but this campus means something to me
an emotion I can't describe
like the dark side of the moon
and something that I don't always want to admit to
like a chaste boy's crush--
a nondescript feeling shaped
like the back of Quasimodo.
"Under the surface of things"
Do you remember that summer
when you dared me to go into the abandoned theme park?
You said,
"I'll give you twenty bucks,
if you break into
the back of that
fake fortune teller's booth."
And I wasn't really
doing it for the money,
but rather to impress you,
when I hopped the fence around midnight sometime in last August.
I cracked the lock easily
and walked into the back door,
entering a hallway that was much too long to really exist.
Walking down it,
I came upon an androgynous figure
wearing a shirt that said on the back,
"The Human Race,"
and looking into a dark lake ahead of it
that appeared to be made up of
some liquid other than water.
Suddenly
a reflection of a flame formed in the fluid
and it spoke something unintelligible.
The figure reacted oddly,
gesturing with its hand to its ear,
as if it wasn't able
to catch what had been said.
So the fire began again
and asked "Where?"
and the thing in front of me responded,
"Geography,"
and the fire asked, "When?"
and the person said,
"History."
The conversation paused
as answers and questions were mulled over
and I could feel actual heat coming
from the glow in the pool.
"Who?"
it finally asked,
and the form replied, "Politics."
The flame appeared to almost take the form of something,
but it quickly returned to a shapeless blob
and said, "What?"
to which it got the answer
"Math,"
which it didn't really seem to like so much,
so it spit out, "How?"
"Science," was the response,
which seemed to almost defeat the fire,
it shimmered in the lake,
but did not vanish,
and once settled it asked, "Why?"
and the figure said, "Philosophy,"
which caused something to happen.
The flame suddenly made itself manifest
into the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,
and the person jumped into the lake
and looked back at me pleadingly,
asked if I was going to join it,
and it had the face
of everyone I'd ever known.
I blinked my eyes then
and when I opened them
I was alone in a tiny box
looking out at the roller coasters
like that fortune teller guy that you found so cute did every day
and as I walked home
I kept asking myself
Was I asleep?
Had I ever been awake?
Have any of us ever been awake?
Do we ever learn anything?
So anyway,
this is what I've been thinking about
since I got that letter in the mail from you last week asking if I could lend you
[*indent*] some money.
"Replacements"
The perfect mate
will always be there for your rainy days
and can make you happy no matter what.
The perfect mate
quickly ends every argument
by accepting all blame.
The perfect mate
will only join you in bed
and never has you up at night worried.
The perfect mate
knows every thought you have
but is not jealous or pushy or anything like that.
The perfect mate
is grown
in the oceans of Ganymede,
gender is chosen approximately
three weeks after germination,
but only by specifications of the future owner.
It sells for $49.95 plus processing & handling
and you should not accept
any imitators--
this is the real deal
offered now in our limited time offer.
Please allow about a month and a half for shipping.
"Regulations of Window-shopping"
Stare at the tops of the stores in the mall
and you can still see people to avoid them,
but do not have to deal with eye contact.
Walk quickly.
Regard nothing with enough thought
so as to create a new memory.
You are just a spoiled
young man
--really just a boy--
scared by his own anger
and converting it to work
into joules
that you are burning
with each step.
Do not run
or otherwise draw attention to yourself
and don't speak.
In fact
please stop this inner monologue.
"Lunacy"
Listening
to the sounds
of Henry
playing his electric piano
with headphones in
is a bit like a dissection
and this guy's going to be a doctor
so
it sort of makes some sense,
don't you think?
Now
on five hours of sleep last night
I can barely stand
so maybe I'm only being floored
by ordinary thoughts
but my mind
is telling me,
"Andy, now,
remember this moment.
There's something here."
Billy Joel playing in the background
is important
and these people I know--
I know I'm making horrible connections
but this campus means something to me
an emotion I can't describe
like the dark side of the moon
and something that I don't always want to admit to
like a chaste boy's crush--
a nondescript feeling shaped
like the back of Quasimodo.
"Under the surface of things"
Do you remember that summer
when you dared me to go into the abandoned theme park?
You said,
"I'll give you twenty bucks,
if you break into
the back of that
fake fortune teller's booth."
And I wasn't really
doing it for the money,
but rather to impress you,
when I hopped the fence around midnight sometime in last August.
I cracked the lock easily
and walked into the back door,
entering a hallway that was much too long to really exist.
Walking down it,
I came upon an androgynous figure
wearing a shirt that said on the back,
"The Human Race,"
and looking into a dark lake ahead of it
that appeared to be made up of
some liquid other than water.
Suddenly
a reflection of a flame formed in the fluid
and it spoke something unintelligible.
The figure reacted oddly,
gesturing with its hand to its ear,
as if it wasn't able
to catch what had been said.
So the fire began again
and asked "Where?"
and the thing in front of me responded,
"Geography,"
and the fire asked, "When?"
and the person said,
"History."
The conversation paused
as answers and questions were mulled over
and I could feel actual heat coming
from the glow in the pool.
"Who?"
it finally asked,
and the form replied, "Politics."
The flame appeared to almost take the form of something,
but it quickly returned to a shapeless blob
and said, "What?"
to which it got the answer
"Math,"
which it didn't really seem to like so much,
so it spit out, "How?"
"Science," was the response,
which seemed to almost defeat the fire,
it shimmered in the lake,
but did not vanish,
and once settled it asked, "Why?"
and the figure said, "Philosophy,"
which caused something to happen.
The flame suddenly made itself manifest
into the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen,
and the person jumped into the lake
and looked back at me pleadingly,
asked if I was going to join it,
and it had the face
of everyone I'd ever known.
I blinked my eyes then
and when I opened them
I was alone in a tiny box
looking out at the roller coasters
like that fortune teller guy that you found so cute did every day
and as I walked home
I kept asking myself
Was I asleep?
Had I ever been awake?
Have any of us ever been awake?
Do we ever learn anything?
So anyway,
this is what I've been thinking about
since I got that letter in the mail from you last week asking if I could lend you
[*indent*] some money.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The inevitable thoughtlessness...
Bothered me a bit to realize last post was a bit misogynist, so I'm going to drop down four poems about women now. And I also didn't really think about the time, so this is coming at 12:19AM, but will be dated as yesterday for format reasons. The blog might still be stuck in Pacifac time, for all I can figure it, so what have you. Titles now are probably going to be first names because it seems to fit better. Addressing a person solely by their last name is considered an oddity most often associated with men, and I'm not making that up, I read it in a Cultural Anthropology textbook, so if I'm being unfair, then complain to Ember & Ember. Also noting that I'm writing pretty much just about dead people, because I think it's a bit odd otherwise.
"Amelia"
On a good day,
maybe,
I think that you found
a door out there
that took you
to some amazing place
that could be ahead for all of us.
"Susan"
I'll admit
that I know you
almost solely
from an oddly shaped dollar.
But I'd love to think
that I'm not completely
wrong
to say that if I'd been alive then
we'd have had similar goals.
This is the thing
that scares me these days--
thinking
if I had been born
in any other age,
would my politics
be as vile
as the rest of them?
I hope not.
"Kate"
The famous man
with your last name
means very little to me
because I'm no musician.
You knew
how to sculpt a novel,
though,
didn't you?
Better than I'll ever do,
I'm sure.
"Virginia"
I somewhat wish
your poem
had an extra line
because then
I could call it a sonnet.
Is it wrong
to consider the fact
that your TB
was clearly
a great deal of his inspiration?
What kind of a person
does that make me?
Your husband
--or was he your brother?--
would not have liked that logic at all.
I mean
I'm not going to speak
for the man
but I'd assume that he'd probably
have given up
his language for you.
"Amelia"
On a good day,
maybe,
I think that you found
a door out there
that took you
to some amazing place
that could be ahead for all of us.
"Susan"
I'll admit
that I know you
almost solely
from an oddly shaped dollar.
But I'd love to think
that I'm not completely
wrong
to say that if I'd been alive then
we'd have had similar goals.
This is the thing
that scares me these days--
thinking
if I had been born
in any other age,
would my politics
be as vile
as the rest of them?
I hope not.
"Kate"
The famous man
with your last name
means very little to me
because I'm no musician.
You knew
how to sculpt a novel,
though,
didn't you?
Better than I'll ever do,
I'm sure.
"Virginia"
I somewhat wish
your poem
had an extra line
because then
I could call it a sonnet.
Is it wrong
to consider the fact
that your TB
was clearly
a great deal of his inspiration?
What kind of a person
does that make me?
Your husband
--or was he your brother?--
would not have liked that logic at all.
I mean
I'm not going to speak
for the man
but I'd assume that he'd probably
have given up
his language for you.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Figureheads
I've begun to think a bit too much in verse. Or at least to think a lot in verse. I don't know if it's too much. But I've started writing these little things about different historical people ("historical" being a broad term, I've written about musicians, political figures, writers, well I guess you could say that those are all the same thing, but damn you, please don't...) or my opinion/reflection/reaction to these historical people. So here I'm going to attempt to come up with four of those...I have two in my head right now, and we'll see if I work out another pair.
"Dessalines"
In the movie theater
when I was almost crying
behind those 3D glasses,
I had to ask myself,
would they have been right
if they had decided
to solely massacre
the human population
that was attempting
to usurp Pandora
from the rightful
peoples?
And what does that say
about your actions
in that time
right when you had declared
your nation apart from them--
Fanon would have it
that violence was the only way
you could become men again.
God,
I hate
such scary
judgment calls.
"Bello"
I think you had some
pretty good questions.
But did you really expect
to get answers?
You wanted to draw
lines in the sand
on the beach
of your history.
I admire that.
I really do.
And I'm sure there's plenty you believed
that I would say was full of shit,
but there's something to say
about us being ostriches--
our heads in the sand--
we aren't asking serious questions
but rather just trying to stir up thought
like Socrates or the Drake Equation
and there's a sort of beautiful sadness here,
isn't there?
That nothing will ever be known.
"Marx"
I'm not particularly mad
or anything
but you sure did
become the face
of a political organization
that has never seen the light of day.
And now
when I invoke identities for myself
people probably think
that I follow your way of thought
when I'd say the only things
we have in common
are our beards.
"Bukowski"
I'm not nearly as upset
by your influence on me
as are those followers of Virginia Woolf
who wonder why you were such an asshole
but it's an interesting thing
and not something I altogether support--
how you have captured
way too many things
that
when I only knew them
inside my own mind
I had thought, well, original.
And to think
if it hadn't been
for some throwaway conversation,
I probably never would've known your name,
and had to deal with
the humbling masochism
that is the writer reading
what has come before.
"Dessalines"
In the movie theater
when I was almost crying
behind those 3D glasses,
I had to ask myself,
would they have been right
if they had decided
to solely massacre
the human population
that was attempting
to usurp Pandora
from the rightful
peoples?
And what does that say
about your actions
in that time
right when you had declared
your nation apart from them--
Fanon would have it
that violence was the only way
you could become men again.
God,
I hate
such scary
judgment calls.
"Bello"
I think you had some
pretty good questions.
But did you really expect
to get answers?
You wanted to draw
lines in the sand
on the beach
of your history.
I admire that.
I really do.
And I'm sure there's plenty you believed
that I would say was full of shit,
but there's something to say
about us being ostriches--
our heads in the sand--
we aren't asking serious questions
but rather just trying to stir up thought
like Socrates or the Drake Equation
and there's a sort of beautiful sadness here,
isn't there?
That nothing will ever be known.
"Marx"
I'm not particularly mad
or anything
but you sure did
become the face
of a political organization
that has never seen the light of day.
And now
when I invoke identities for myself
people probably think
that I follow your way of thought
when I'd say the only things
we have in common
are our beards.
"Bukowski"
I'm not nearly as upset
by your influence on me
as are those followers of Virginia Woolf
who wonder why you were such an asshole
but it's an interesting thing
and not something I altogether support--
how you have captured
way too many things
that
when I only knew them
inside my own mind
I had thought, well, original.
And to think
if it hadn't been
for some throwaway conversation,
I probably never would've known your name,
and had to deal with
the humbling masochism
that is the writer reading
what has come before.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Know thyself.
The Oracle at Delphi would have us know ourselves and take everything in moderation. I'm really not trying to be too profound, but you know how it goes. This is something I can do, I'm pretty sure, so I'm going to try. One hundred poems in February, all somewhat unique and written within the confines of the month. They're all going to be short and probably not very good, but it's a solid idea to keep the production level up, I'd say, and I guess there might be some people who actually read stuff that I've written here and don't have any overlap with my writings elsewhere, so I might as well update a bit again.
"Bluepill"
I'd much rather
be a battery for some machine
with a present purpose
in my own mini merry mindscape
than fight a war
with your futile resistance.
"Sokrates"
Hey man, slow down,
I know you already
threw back the hemlock,
but please stop
walking around this room,
because I have a few
questions for you.
Do I seem like a virtuous man?
What have I done wrong?
If everything is supposed to be
in its right place,
then where is the promised happiness
that you gave to the just man?
God,
I know why you didn't write anything down,
it's because you were serious when you said
you didn't know anything,
isn't it?
Well
I can't fault you
when you tell me the truth.
"117"
I keep my dark passenger
locked up nine nights out of ten
but right now
he's roaming free
two guns in his hands
mowing down people like they're grass.
It's a little scary
these thoughts I have,
these things I sometimes think
maybe I want to do.
This is an exorcism--
playing target practice with heads.
But then someone else
gets the upper hand
and stabs me
one too many times
in the back.
As my body disappears,
I try not to really think about anything,
as I wait to respawn.
"The Good Life"
Just listening to my grandmother
or taking part in a debate on our beliefs
gives me even more reason to consider my outlook
apolitical.
I think somewhere between
Aristotle and Machiavelli
we forgot that life shouldn't be lived
for science or the future or anything but
yourself, the people you love,
and children if you so choose.
We pay too much attention
these days
to what's happening
in fifty years
rather than tomorrow.
Even worse
is our necessity
to know
what Barack is thinking
when we can't even talk
to the person in bed next to us.
"Bluepill"
I'd much rather
be a battery for some machine
with a present purpose
in my own mini merry mindscape
than fight a war
with your futile resistance.
"Sokrates"
Hey man, slow down,
I know you already
threw back the hemlock,
but please stop
walking around this room,
because I have a few
questions for you.
Do I seem like a virtuous man?
What have I done wrong?
If everything is supposed to be
in its right place,
then where is the promised happiness
that you gave to the just man?
God,
I know why you didn't write anything down,
it's because you were serious when you said
you didn't know anything,
isn't it?
Well
I can't fault you
when you tell me the truth.
"117"
I keep my dark passenger
locked up nine nights out of ten
but right now
he's roaming free
two guns in his hands
mowing down people like they're grass.
It's a little scary
these thoughts I have,
these things I sometimes think
maybe I want to do.
This is an exorcism--
playing target practice with heads.
But then someone else
gets the upper hand
and stabs me
one too many times
in the back.
As my body disappears,
I try not to really think about anything,
as I wait to respawn.
"The Good Life"
Just listening to my grandmother
or taking part in a debate on our beliefs
gives me even more reason to consider my outlook
apolitical.
I think somewhere between
Aristotle and Machiavelli
we forgot that life shouldn't be lived
for science or the future or anything but
yourself, the people you love,
and children if you so choose.
We pay too much attention
these days
to what's happening
in fifty years
rather than tomorrow.
Even worse
is our necessity
to know
what Barack is thinking
when we can't even talk
to the person in bed next to us.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
My uniformed opinion...
This title could turn into a series in a similar way to this post. Apologies, but my laptop battery is about to die, I am publishing this without looking into what I want to reitalicize from the Word document I am going to paste. "*" means that at least in the original document I plan to write in a footnote at some time.
Now for the feature presentation:
I think it’s somewhat the job of history to put down people who made wrong estimations about the future and people who got things right. And since everyone is human and thusly imperfect, all people in the latter category also occupy the former. Since I’m no historian, I see the need to point out that nothing that I say is to be taken as the absolute truth, and that all predictions I make will undoubtedly end up in the former category, but I see no fault in sharing my own thoughts on these matters.
Okay, done with the disclosure. Wrap it up with I am not a political theorist or economist and haven’t read enough of Karl Marx to say what I am saying about him with any authority. So, now then, let’s move on to the point. The way I see Karl Marx is as an almost historian, himself, someone who for the most part only made predictions. The Communist Manifesto was obviously meant to turn people towards overthrowing the bourgeoisie, but otherwise, you can see Marx as simply someone interpreting the world he’s in and wondering where it would go.
Marx saw economics as a story, in a way, something that had plot movements, and could be read like a book, rather than the opposing view of something so cyclical and repetitive that it could not be read chronologically. Simplifying things, like he did in the manifesto, although he was more in depth elsewhere, history is like this: We step from feudalism into capitalism, which, although allowing for a better life for more people than feudalism does, also puts the still vast majority into worse lives than they had, then this group, the proletariat, rise up through revolution and form a classless society. It is not difficult to look at Marx as a somewhat careless observer of these events, and although this is blatantly not the case, I do believe it is a point that is not raised oft enough.
Personally, the oddest thing in learning more about specific great political thinkers of the past is finding that I do not agree one way or the other. I do not see Locke as more correct than Rousseau or Marx as righter than Burke. It seems helpful, in our views of these people of the past, to look at them as abstract characters, uncolored by their biases or their environment, and I really do not think that this thought process can be held to the extreme, so I don’t see any real problem with it. I mean, we spend so much time considering why people of the past thought exactly what they thought, that it seems we may often miss the actual point.
And I guess that all of this up to here has been even more disclosure, but what have you. This is Karl Marx: a bearded German man who will be clumped with the Russians of the next generation, people who will corrupt his views and make his name Mudd*; he’s a staunch atheist, an anti-Semite, and a commie. So now that that’s all out there, we can forget it. It is my belief that we cannot truly see Marx as a person separate from his bias, so in attempting to do so, we can only grow to see his politics more clearly, rather than to celebrate the man as separate from whom he was.
Let us then return to the beginning of this discussion, when I classified that there are two types of people catalogued by historians, these groups can be seen as concentric circles, as one is all but completely located in the other. For a bit of a refresher, since my wordiness has put some serious distance between that first point and this one, I will say that the bigger circle is made up of everyone who has ever made a wrongful prediction of the future, while the smaller circle is everyone who has made a correct one. Now I wish to provide an example of qualification for both of these circles for Marx, one of which I will elaborate on.
It does not seem to be “too early” to call Marx’s views of the coming proletariat revolution as inaccurate, since here Karl sided too much with Hobbes or even Rousseau in a world of scarcity. What I mean to say is that Marx, at least for a small degree of the population, understated actual humanity and its inner humaneness. This is shown in his view of the capitalist as the fat cat with a cigar who sees all others as dollar signs*. All three of these thinkers seem to believe that people (or capitalists in Marx’s view) are driven solely by self-interest, or at least that any feelings of empathy or compassion are easily outweighed by self-interest. Marx’s labor theory of value, besides simplified to the extent of being inaccurate, seems to neglect the sheer fact of capitalism, itself, in that the worker can sell his potential product to the highest bidder, since there is more than just one person who owns the means of production. Here, it is very truthful, in my opinion, to say that Marx made a simple mistake in prediction, and if we wish to reenter thoughts of his biases, then we can say that Karl has failed, like Upton Sinclair*, in creating the socialist world that he wished for.
Up until this point in the discussion, I believe that I have kept within the views of the average American, a person who has been alive for a fair amount of the past century, and through the propaganda that is a result of half a hundred years of conflict, have developed a nasty little thought process towards socialism, namely that it is evil. I am here to say that that thought process is neither here nor there. Concerning it, I am, unfortunately, not completely without a side, as I am towards the political thinkers I have learned about, but my disagreement with that sort of simplification is not relevant or important in any way. Therefore I did not use this mindset of pink as it might be claimed, in order to reach the conclusion that I have reached regarding what Marx has correctly predicted.
At last, then, I have reached the thought process that first initiated the idea of this blog post back three or so days ago, now. No matter how you view Karl Marx, and no matter what he thought, no matter what incorrect predictions he made, he was accurate concerning the future of intellectual property in the arts. This does not mean that Marx was even interested in the arts or intellectual property, but rather that one of his predictions, when specialized, becomes incredibly accurate.
Marx saw the capitalist system as formulated in such a way that it would eventually eat itself, create monopolies, and formulate a two-class system of proletariat and bourgeoisie, that would blah, blah, blah, lead to communism. He saw this as happening because capitalists would reinvest capital into making their productions so efficient, that they would decrease cost to the extent that they would also have to decrease profit to next to nothing, since value would decrease so much.
This hasn’t happened anywhere that I can see outside of the music industry. It is very interesting to imagine Marx’s time of formulating these ideas, when there were only the beginnings of telephonic communication to show for the technological innovations that would eventually lead to the internet. It is through the internet that the music industry has effectively cut its production costs to zero. Other than the actual cost of making music, the time taken to create it, and suchlike cash devouring things, music distribution is now free.
Now, let’s match this up with Marx: efficiency in production leads to low costs and then to low profits. This fits almost perfectly with the current issue of musicians, who can create an entire album and sell as little as potentially one copy, while the distribution by way of the internet and illegal downloading drops the profits to the same dismal level. Now, I don’t mean to be mistaken as Metallica, attacking every seven year old girl and her great-grandmother for stealing my creations, while I can always sit back on my millions of dollars.
But I do see this as a potential issue for the music industry, musicians, and writers (and I guess their industry as well). It is a good point to make that although the music industry has been grossly affected; this potential cancer has not injected itself completely into the art of the word itself. It will soon enough, however, as the time of the e-reader must come upon us sometime. By way of either kindle, e-reader, nook, or some other variant, I do see a time when a majority of books are only bought and owned digitally. And it is at this point that people begin to show how little they actually care for the product.
I do not mean to slight consumers or myself (since I’ve been known to dabble along the edges of illegal music downloading), but rather to show a potential view of both the present and the future, in much the same way as our virtual bias-less Karl Marx did. The fact of the situation is that people will not pay the same amount of money for a CD or a book as they would pay for the songs or the stories/novels freed from their tangibility. It is, for this reason, that I would point to the professional artist as an occupation that cannot house any person whose views are completely and whole-heartedly capitalist. The future artist will need to depend on his or her fans, and bands will be able to make money through both touring and sales of albums/music, but the latter will be effective donations, so they must elicit in their fan-base support on the level that people would wish to basically sponsor their art.
Otherwise a musician or another type of artist can easily distribute his or her music for virtually no cost, but cannot gather the means of production of more, namely through gathering of capital, in this case, basically money to live and produce art by. And that’s where Karl Marx has definitely been accurate as a predictor.
Final thoughts: potential solutions are always nice. I see this as a major problem for people who wish to live one day on their art alone, as long as that art’s worth is derived from mainly non-tangible parts of it. But it will only increase the fan-creator situation. Imagine a world in which a young Stephen King truly did have to court potential Constant Readers, to gather money from them, allowing him to give up his teaching job or time with the mangler. I see this world as an interesting one and the only thing I can truly see as solving issues of this nature is what I’ve already mentioned. A band/musician/writer/creator who views a work as a means of asking for donations from a crowd, must thusly reevaluate every part of said creation. Things will be made better for a time, and if this does elicit a response from the consumer, they will stay as such: always getting better, cooler, more awesome; the goal is to make you want more, enough so that you would support such creation. I think this would create a more balanced relationship between artist and fan, for better or for worse*. And in this way, we might see more moves along the lines of leftrightleftrightleft or No Ceilings, creations which are cited as being solely for the benefit of fans.
This would lead to a society similar to Plato’s Republic, where the leadership is supported by the lower classes, and does not make money itself*. Where, in this country, it is true that the president does not grow his own food and live on subsistence, and that he gains a salary for his job, this is true for a large degree of Americans, and is due in part to imperialism, which I might get to talking on at another time. I wish to point out that in Plato’s potential world, the ruling class was thusly indebted to the lower class, and the same would be for the artist and the fan-base.
And, if you have followed me all the way through this loopy brain-dumping, then I thank you. I have little else to say on the topic, so, as always, sorry for boring you.
Now for the feature presentation:
I think it’s somewhat the job of history to put down people who made wrong estimations about the future and people who got things right. And since everyone is human and thusly imperfect, all people in the latter category also occupy the former. Since I’m no historian, I see the need to point out that nothing that I say is to be taken as the absolute truth, and that all predictions I make will undoubtedly end up in the former category, but I see no fault in sharing my own thoughts on these matters.
Okay, done with the disclosure. Wrap it up with I am not a political theorist or economist and haven’t read enough of Karl Marx to say what I am saying about him with any authority. So, now then, let’s move on to the point. The way I see Karl Marx is as an almost historian, himself, someone who for the most part only made predictions. The Communist Manifesto was obviously meant to turn people towards overthrowing the bourgeoisie, but otherwise, you can see Marx as simply someone interpreting the world he’s in and wondering where it would go.
Marx saw economics as a story, in a way, something that had plot movements, and could be read like a book, rather than the opposing view of something so cyclical and repetitive that it could not be read chronologically. Simplifying things, like he did in the manifesto, although he was more in depth elsewhere, history is like this: We step from feudalism into capitalism, which, although allowing for a better life for more people than feudalism does, also puts the still vast majority into worse lives than they had, then this group, the proletariat, rise up through revolution and form a classless society. It is not difficult to look at Marx as a somewhat careless observer of these events, and although this is blatantly not the case, I do believe it is a point that is not raised oft enough.
Personally, the oddest thing in learning more about specific great political thinkers of the past is finding that I do not agree one way or the other. I do not see Locke as more correct than Rousseau or Marx as righter than Burke. It seems helpful, in our views of these people of the past, to look at them as abstract characters, uncolored by their biases or their environment, and I really do not think that this thought process can be held to the extreme, so I don’t see any real problem with it. I mean, we spend so much time considering why people of the past thought exactly what they thought, that it seems we may often miss the actual point.
And I guess that all of this up to here has been even more disclosure, but what have you. This is Karl Marx: a bearded German man who will be clumped with the Russians of the next generation, people who will corrupt his views and make his name Mudd*; he’s a staunch atheist, an anti-Semite, and a commie. So now that that’s all out there, we can forget it. It is my belief that we cannot truly see Marx as a person separate from his bias, so in attempting to do so, we can only grow to see his politics more clearly, rather than to celebrate the man as separate from whom he was.
Let us then return to the beginning of this discussion, when I classified that there are two types of people catalogued by historians, these groups can be seen as concentric circles, as one is all but completely located in the other. For a bit of a refresher, since my wordiness has put some serious distance between that first point and this one, I will say that the bigger circle is made up of everyone who has ever made a wrongful prediction of the future, while the smaller circle is everyone who has made a correct one. Now I wish to provide an example of qualification for both of these circles for Marx, one of which I will elaborate on.
It does not seem to be “too early” to call Marx’s views of the coming proletariat revolution as inaccurate, since here Karl sided too much with Hobbes or even Rousseau in a world of scarcity. What I mean to say is that Marx, at least for a small degree of the population, understated actual humanity and its inner humaneness. This is shown in his view of the capitalist as the fat cat with a cigar who sees all others as dollar signs*. All three of these thinkers seem to believe that people (or capitalists in Marx’s view) are driven solely by self-interest, or at least that any feelings of empathy or compassion are easily outweighed by self-interest. Marx’s labor theory of value, besides simplified to the extent of being inaccurate, seems to neglect the sheer fact of capitalism, itself, in that the worker can sell his potential product to the highest bidder, since there is more than just one person who owns the means of production. Here, it is very truthful, in my opinion, to say that Marx made a simple mistake in prediction, and if we wish to reenter thoughts of his biases, then we can say that Karl has failed, like Upton Sinclair*, in creating the socialist world that he wished for.
Up until this point in the discussion, I believe that I have kept within the views of the average American, a person who has been alive for a fair amount of the past century, and through the propaganda that is a result of half a hundred years of conflict, have developed a nasty little thought process towards socialism, namely that it is evil. I am here to say that that thought process is neither here nor there. Concerning it, I am, unfortunately, not completely without a side, as I am towards the political thinkers I have learned about, but my disagreement with that sort of simplification is not relevant or important in any way. Therefore I did not use this mindset of pink as it might be claimed, in order to reach the conclusion that I have reached regarding what Marx has correctly predicted.
At last, then, I have reached the thought process that first initiated the idea of this blog post back three or so days ago, now. No matter how you view Karl Marx, and no matter what he thought, no matter what incorrect predictions he made, he was accurate concerning the future of intellectual property in the arts. This does not mean that Marx was even interested in the arts or intellectual property, but rather that one of his predictions, when specialized, becomes incredibly accurate.
Marx saw the capitalist system as formulated in such a way that it would eventually eat itself, create monopolies, and formulate a two-class system of proletariat and bourgeoisie, that would blah, blah, blah, lead to communism. He saw this as happening because capitalists would reinvest capital into making their productions so efficient, that they would decrease cost to the extent that they would also have to decrease profit to next to nothing, since value would decrease so much.
This hasn’t happened anywhere that I can see outside of the music industry. It is very interesting to imagine Marx’s time of formulating these ideas, when there were only the beginnings of telephonic communication to show for the technological innovations that would eventually lead to the internet. It is through the internet that the music industry has effectively cut its production costs to zero. Other than the actual cost of making music, the time taken to create it, and suchlike cash devouring things, music distribution is now free.
Now, let’s match this up with Marx: efficiency in production leads to low costs and then to low profits. This fits almost perfectly with the current issue of musicians, who can create an entire album and sell as little as potentially one copy, while the distribution by way of the internet and illegal downloading drops the profits to the same dismal level. Now, I don’t mean to be mistaken as Metallica, attacking every seven year old girl and her great-grandmother for stealing my creations, while I can always sit back on my millions of dollars.
But I do see this as a potential issue for the music industry, musicians, and writers (and I guess their industry as well). It is a good point to make that although the music industry has been grossly affected; this potential cancer has not injected itself completely into the art of the word itself. It will soon enough, however, as the time of the e-reader must come upon us sometime. By way of either kindle, e-reader, nook, or some other variant, I do see a time when a majority of books are only bought and owned digitally. And it is at this point that people begin to show how little they actually care for the product.
I do not mean to slight consumers or myself (since I’ve been known to dabble along the edges of illegal music downloading), but rather to show a potential view of both the present and the future, in much the same way as our virtual bias-less Karl Marx did. The fact of the situation is that people will not pay the same amount of money for a CD or a book as they would pay for the songs or the stories/novels freed from their tangibility. It is, for this reason, that I would point to the professional artist as an occupation that cannot house any person whose views are completely and whole-heartedly capitalist. The future artist will need to depend on his or her fans, and bands will be able to make money through both touring and sales of albums/music, but the latter will be effective donations, so they must elicit in their fan-base support on the level that people would wish to basically sponsor their art.
Otherwise a musician or another type of artist can easily distribute his or her music for virtually no cost, but cannot gather the means of production of more, namely through gathering of capital, in this case, basically money to live and produce art by. And that’s where Karl Marx has definitely been accurate as a predictor.
Final thoughts: potential solutions are always nice. I see this as a major problem for people who wish to live one day on their art alone, as long as that art’s worth is derived from mainly non-tangible parts of it. But it will only increase the fan-creator situation. Imagine a world in which a young Stephen King truly did have to court potential Constant Readers, to gather money from them, allowing him to give up his teaching job or time with the mangler. I see this world as an interesting one and the only thing I can truly see as solving issues of this nature is what I’ve already mentioned. A band/musician/writer/creator who views a work as a means of asking for donations from a crowd, must thusly reevaluate every part of said creation. Things will be made better for a time, and if this does elicit a response from the consumer, they will stay as such: always getting better, cooler, more awesome; the goal is to make you want more, enough so that you would support such creation. I think this would create a more balanced relationship between artist and fan, for better or for worse*. And in this way, we might see more moves along the lines of leftrightleftrightleft or No Ceilings, creations which are cited as being solely for the benefit of fans.
This would lead to a society similar to Plato’s Republic, where the leadership is supported by the lower classes, and does not make money itself*. Where, in this country, it is true that the president does not grow his own food and live on subsistence, and that he gains a salary for his job, this is true for a large degree of Americans, and is due in part to imperialism, which I might get to talking on at another time. I wish to point out that in Plato’s potential world, the ruling class was thusly indebted to the lower class, and the same would be for the artist and the fan-base.
And, if you have followed me all the way through this loopy brain-dumping, then I thank you. I have little else to say on the topic, so, as always, sorry for boring you.
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