Motley Kamuka

The Irma Luhrman-Merman murder Turned the bird’s word lurid The whir and the purr of a twirler girl She would the world were demurrer The insurer’s allure For valor were pure Kari Wuhrer One fervid whirl over her turgid error Rural juror Rural juror I will never forget you Rural juror I’ll always be glad I met you Rural juror I will never forget you Rural juror

"Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party." ( HCR ) There was a woman from Ivory Coast in my neighborhood (black), who married a Hungarian man (white). We got along well until we started talking politics. She said January 6th was a protest, not an insurrection, and I told her I couldn't talk to someone whom I didn't share ...

I'm struggling to get back to work now that my daughter is school age. I was walking along thinking about my antipathy for the todo list.  Then I thought how Shulem has to pretend he's making a gifted school, to appeal to the vanities of the parents, to win his school back when it's wrestled away from him.  Sometimes you have to participate in antithetical things you don't like to keep what you do like. That is just one of the many countless absurdities of the modern life. I also loved the conflict between the ascetic life, the pious life, versus the artistic life, the life of beauty. I think the spiritual life needs beauty, that's how you find the spiritual life. And yet running for comfort and pleasure don't work. 

I searched Oksana on Reddit, because I'd thought Oksana Zabuzhko would come up, the author of the Ukrainian novel I'm reading, but instead I got the photo of a nurse who got her legs blown off by Russian bombs in Lysychansk. You can watch her husband dance with her at her wedding . You can watch her rehab . More rehab . There's another Oksana who died, she was an actress . Another Oksana is a sniper . There's a woman in my neighborhood who is Ukrainian, who has a son my daughter sometimes plays with. She's a nurse. Different fate. She works long hard hours and takes a long subway ride. A woman from Honduras has a son her sons age, and they play a lot and she watches both kids. She cleans offices. Her husband is Mexican and works in a restaurant.  Where is it safe? Where is life good? "...in general all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten." p. 115 "And where there's no beauty--how can...

Tonight, terror will probably come. Hot shivers—of lovemaking or vomiting. Foreboding debauched coupling Or death's cry--shake the ailing body. Rupture, rupture--all ligaments, nerves, veins: My defenselessness is now so total, Like an overt call to evil: Come! I've already seen myself as a building In which an orange rectangle burns   in the night, a bare window, With planks across the chest And bottom of the abdomen, like for an X-ray, And the rock, the one to shatter the pane Already lies there, waiting for the hand. (p.92-3 from FIUS) I see the spaceship from Star Trek: Discovery. Cleveland Book's spaceship disassembles, and reforms to fit through things as it flies. I think that is how we must all be, shattering and reassembling in impossible ways. The novel with the word "sex" in it is  Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, but it's mostly about disappointments sexually, sexual pain, and frustrating and failed relationships of a poet with a painter, as it relates ...

The Met stopped doing blackface in 2015 . That Gelb sends a letter to Netrebko in 2022 telling her she hasn't caught onto the fashion is kind of funny ( background ). He's rarely been head of the curve, is reactive like all unenlightened beings.  I've been thinking a lot about how in the 70's we in America stopped defining homosexuality as pathological, stopped doing ice pick lobotomies. They are still done today but much more rigorously, like like electric shock therapy. Now there are people who write memoirs about how the procedure saves their lives. The best way to sell prozac was to write a book about how it was unfair to give people who were under performing it to make them exceptional, because you know everyone ran out hoping to be exceptional.  The 70's was when abortion became legal and the pill came out. MAGA depends on a magical past that never existed, well my nostalgia is more historically based and issue based.  It's the 70's where there's a...

A heritage Hindu lets westerners know we should understand the roots of Buddhism 2500 years ago. He resents it when others imagine he's more spiritual because he's from the east. And he isn't saying that Buddhism is just an extension of Hinduism. But he's come to some understandings reading some books and going on retreat with white people. “…people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary “cognitive mapping.” The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions.”   Zizek Reducing Buddhism to a fetish isn’t the most sympathetic stance. Zizek is probably better at describing the ideological setting, not re...

Another parent in the park who I talk to every once in a while, when she is not working as a nurse, is from Ukraine. Her husband understands English but has more trouble speaking it. They send their son to Ukrainian school to help him learn the language and it's really helped him in school because he hears the language at home, but he doesn't study it formally, until recently. He also has upgraded his preference for his name to go from Vollo to Volodymyr, because the heroic president has the same name. So the other day it occured to me to read a novel by a Ukrainian and I came up with Zabuzhko. Ordered it from the library and poof, it was ready for pickup at my local branch in no time. Ubi panis ibi patria means home is where you feel comfortable. I read it in Oksana Zabuzhko ’s novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex . The narrator is a female poet with a sexually adventurous nature, though she doesn't romanticize sexuality, she just articulates it. Despite the title it’s not e...

Rachel Kushner  has a story in the New Yorker that she reads aloud.

Tamara de Lempicka is fascinating in this video on YouTube .

Started a biography of Cicero by Anthony Everitt. “His big idea, which he tirelessly publicized, was that of a mixed or balanced constitution.” (p.7) Cicerone denuncia Catilina (1888) by  Cesare Maccari Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on 3 January 106 BC in Arpinum  and died in 43BC, time running backwards from our perspective, at 63, spoiler, beheaded by Marc Anthony, which was OK because routinely killed. He wrote more than three-quarters of extant Latin literature that is known to have existed in his lifetime. He was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic. “Very few other men have both stood at the centre of world events and written so well and fully about the part they played. ” (Michael Grant Cicero: Selected Works )  According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "the Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." He impact on leaded Enlight...

There's a lot of cringe in the show, and that put me off, though of course the comeuppance is grand, and you get to like the characters. I'm on my second rewatch. I've written about the comedy an obvious narcissism ( one , two three ), and I don't really find it funny most of the time, but it can occasionally be. I first thought of it watching Archer. He's such an ass, so oblivious. But that is part of the point. Then Arrested Development. And then the Canadian version, and perhaps the best version, is Schitt's Creek. Six seasons with 13, and later 14 episodes a season, end up with 80 episodes. I've exhausted New Girl, Community, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Corner Gas and 30 Rock, which leaves Netflix at the end of this month, and exhausts my digestible sitcom dietary needs, that I've seen before and I don't have to pay attention to. I used to be obsessive about making sure I saw everything in a narrative. I also like sci-fi, so I ca...