This is from mr ishmael's notebook of June 2014. You might like it, especially those old friends of the Ishmael family namechecked here.
Lenny Bruce is dead But his ghost lived on and on Never did get any Golden Globe award Never made it to Synanon He was an outlaw, that's for sure More of an outlaw than you ever were Lenny Bruce is gone But his spirit's living on and on Maybe he had some problems Maybe some things that he couldn't work out But he sure was funny and he sure told the truth And he knew what he was talking about Never robbed any churches Nor cut off any babies heads He just took the folks in high places And he shined a light in their beds He's on some other shore He didn't wanna live anymore Lenny Bruce is dead But he didn't commit any crime He just had the insight To rip off the lid before its time I rode with him in a taxi once Only for a mile and a half Seemed like it took a couple of months Lenny Bruce moved on And like the ones that killed him, gone They said that he was sick 'Cause he didn't play by the rules He just showed the wise men of his day To be nothing more than fools They stamped him and they labeled him Like they do with pants and shirts He fought a war on a battlefield Where every victory hurts Lenny Bruce was bad
He was the brother that you never had
He was the brother that you never had
Back when Bob Dylan was something special he had a song which included the lines:
...and here I sit, so patiently,
waiting to find out what price
you haveta pay to get out of
going through all these things twice.
For years mr mongoose and I have traded obscure Dylan lines and phrases all across these telegraphs and he will know; mr verge, the house filthster will know, ms lilith, sad-eyed lady of the wetlands will know, mr pt barnum, mr mothers ruin, mr young anglo-Irish catholic, mrs narcolept on her cemetery walks, with her kitchen filled with motorcycle parts; mrs raft, tugging on reality's mooring line -
I am none of these names you call me.
I don't come here to be praised; a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist, it makes me uneasy, I am unaccustomed to it and my young friend, stanislav, never responded to it - is fucking plumber, not in fucking showbiz with arsebandit and fucking babyfucker, not want fucking BAFTA - but then he seldom responded to anything, there would be yards and yards of stan's the man stuff, stan for prime minister, stan made me laugh so much my wife had to call a fucking ambulance. And there would be other stuff, serious, lit-crit analyses by serious lit-crit people. I am not sure that I can speak FOR stanislav but I do know that he only existed within that brief, noisy milieu, and was unable, therefore, to respond to extant, corporeal third parties, woulda been stupid, really, wouldn't it, like talking to a character in a book. stanislav's name was never capitalised because he wasn't a proper noun, not a proper person just a visiting voice but pay no heed, that's just me being the apostrophe jihadist whom I normally condemn, the empty headed. nit-picking, cheese-paring, hair-splitting grammacist-policeperson of cyberspace; never managed to stamp him out, he is alive and well, all over the place, smug and stupid, holding Ruin's jacket for him. Inasmuch as he said anything outside of his missionary-noir rants he did try to raise the tone, reproving commenters for their discourtesies one to the other - even if bloke is cunt, is best call him mr cunt, is only fucking polite, proper english way, best is to play ball and not bloke. It surprised me just how quickly people did start pre-fixing the most unlikely tags with a Mr or, rarely, a Mrs.
I don't moderate, I don't edit, I don't link, I don't advertise and in five years I would be surprised if I had deleted one comment per year; I don't like to do it, it is against my instincts, I especially don't like and try not to do it in the wee small hours for fear it might add to another's, what, discomfort, loneliness, whatever it is which fuels the lonesome, insomniac obsession to which I sometimes fall victim.
The fingerbells of the Incredible String Band jingle through these lines, through my life; here and there, a little, joyous ping of punctuation, a note of completion, affirming a sentence here, a paragraph there.
7 comments:
House Filthster, is it? As long as there isn't a uniform. (And HF anagrams to "fuels other shit"...or "shit's other fuel." Just saying.)
v./
It's a filthy job, mr verge, but somebody has got to do it.
I never managed to get many Bob references past mr i. I once slipped in just two or three words from a lyric - and I wish I could remember what they were now but I can't. As the man says, we were at it for a while. Anyway, whatever the subject and whatevcer the response, in the smoke of the twilight past my eyes it went, reasoned and courteous. And then in the last sentence or two a wee lyrical counterpoint skooshed by to indicate, unseen probably to anyone else, that he had noticed, caught it and understood. I miss our silly but gentle game.
On the gardening front, mrs i, mrs mongoose has raised almost a hundred sunflower hatchlings. They're about three/four inches high at the moment but we plan a mad regiment of six-foot high buggers manning the perimeter of Mongoose Towers.
And you could probably live off the seeds for a bit, Mr Mongoose, if need be. And doesn't that scale of operation entitle you to one of those farming subsidies? Oh, no, wait...
cheers
v./
Cheers, mr verge, however we certainly consider the raising of the Sunflower Regiment to be an essential occupation. I have awarded mrs m a salary of a squillion pounds per week and will write this very afternoon to Santa Sunak asking for my 80%, in gold would be best, I think.
mr mongoose, I have taken many photographs of the garden as per mr bb's request, so I will set about uploading them this afternoon, as it is cold and windy here. Easier, certainly, than planting out a hundred sunflower babies.
The mr Dylan game sounds fun - I never picked up what you two were playing at. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge - and library, written and audio, of Dylan stuff. We used to have Dylan songs to do the decorating by or to make the dinner by.
Your game reminds me of a Senior Management team meeting some years back, led by our Director, a man of considerable presence, giant propensities, etc. Two of my daring colleagues bet each other re who could introduce the most Beatles song titles into the supposedly deadly serious discussions. This is high level local authority management, I remind you - not the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Anyway, they were hard at it, keeping straight faces, thinking they were getting away with it, competetively fired up to win the bet, when, at the close of the meeting, the Director capped their efforts with one of his own. I've never known him so human. They still had to see him in his office after, though.
mr verge, there is a uniform. You probably know the one, it featured quite frequently in mr ishmael's early works. Doesn't look very comfortable. There's a picture of it on our computer. You wouldn't believe the photos he saved to use as illustrations - no, wait, you would - you've been reading the blog forever.
Well, ok, but as the follower formerly known as Abu Tup Dass, I reserve the right not to handle a pig's bladder, however well cured.
v./
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