Like a Log

I love films about the DDR, aka East Germany. This is probably generational. I’m a boomer and was used to cold war. But also it reflects my politics. I am anti-capitalist and accordingly have a natural curiosity about and empathy for anti-capitalist regimes, as awful as they may have been.

There are of course good Americans, even white ones. But they seem increasingly outnumbered by bad ones. 

The need to write is already enough of an aggravation without having to worry about getting published. Besides, I’m retired and the internet “lets me” give it away.

Jingles and Quips. Old Spice. See the USA in your Chevrolet   

Forgone confusion

Typical bad behaviour of territorial primates.

From a feline perspective humans are strange. They actually go to a bathroom when they go to the bathroom, rather than to a box.

The Groves of Academe, the novel.

Many African-Americans suffer from the same blind (or deaf) prescriptive monolingualism as white Americans, even if they speak AAVE (aka Ebonics) and are thus bi-dialectal.

Articles Archives – Foreign Crime Drama

 Poetry 093546

Open the gates of poetry

My conversion

Vietnam is the Asian country which most affected my life because of the American war. But I also feel the ancestral call from Japan, China and Korea.

Im a rhymester, a lover of ditties and jingles and the like. But I’m also loyal to my concretists phase, including an affection for found poems, prose poems, any use of language which calls attention to how strange it is.

^^^^^^

Everything could be
structured differently. But it ain’t!

II = imho the best indigenous identifying poet

A whole passel of folks with values antithetical to my own have a lot of power..  What to do about this ?

Hedonism is a philosophy for the old. Youth itself is pure pleasure. The young don’t need to reflect on it.

Not yet Altzy, Parky or demented
just plain old senile

Make the Universal Yiddish Library a Reality

Down in Houston

Zydeco

Houston Bound

Beyoncé, Creoles, and Modern Blackness

During the week I had asymptomatic  covid I had weird dreams and  I am sure that my purportedly innocuous bout of omicron has sped me on my way to dementia. Or maybe I was losing it before covid, which just gave me a way to conceptualize what was happening.

Kouri-vini, or KV in linguist shorthand, is the name that certain proponents of Louisiana Creole, LC, have adopted for that language. It is different from Louisiana or Cajun French, which is a variety of French, LF.

It is hard to explain without getting technical, but the grammar of the two languages are different.  “I do it” is “je le fais” in LF, but “mo fe li” in KV. In other words, LF is SOV (subject-object-verb) while KV is SVO (gvsubject-verb-object).

To which must be added: “Creole” as a people or group refers to the “mixed-race” descendents of the inhabitants before the 1803 purchase of the French  colony by the US.

Creoles included “free persons of color”, slaves (or enslaved persons, as the contemporary jargon has it), and Cajuns or descendents of the refugees from French Canada after the English victory in 1759. They were usually Catholic and French-speaking, as opposed to the new majority Anglo-Protestants both black and white, and Indians, a few of whom still speak French, apparently.

That, st least, is my take on it ….

I’m not ML, but I do know that line pretty well. In fact, during the period of time I was politically active  I was what I  thought of a Menchevik.

Here,  for example, is a document for which I was responsible as VP (Communication) of the Quebec NDP (75-77). With intro but in French only.

https://alteritas.net/GXL/?page_id=3014

“Bluntly put, characterizing gentrification as a racial/cultural problem leads directly to easily accommodated demands for equal-opportunity access to the plunder that is the foundation of the regime of relentless upward redistribution.”

As my days are increasingly numbered, one curiosity about the future, which shall remain unknown to me, still harbour is whether or not there’ll be a revolution which would reverse the “regime  of relentless upward distribution.” The odds seem against it

In my senior year I hit and killed a drunken pedestrian. Fortunately he was not just a drunken person but a well-known drunk who had been staggering down the street (witnesses said), and I was not charged. But the reaction among my community of that time was telling and formative.  

I had not been religious prior to this event and I became even more virulently anti-religious when I received several phone calls from local Baptists, who offered me the solace of Jesus’s love. The first call angered me, but I didn’t express the depths of my anger. When others began to call, almost in a chain, I exploded and began cursing their pure effrontery and hypocrisy.

The reaction of the high school bullies was different.  I was vested with an aura of respect. I had after all killed someone, more then they, hopefully, would ever do.