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...