sex in The Age of Nixon

"Sometimes I felt like I was writing a book about the history of sexual neuroses in the American ’60s. You had cops saying about antiwar protesters, “You pull down their pants, and they ain’t got no pecker.” You had a janitor after the march on the Pentagon being quoted in Time saying this absurd, impossible thing, that all the garbage was panties. You had Richard Nixon saying in 1971, when these brave anti-war Vietnam veterans are encamped in the Mall, “They’re just screwing chicks in their sleeping bags.” On the other side, you have one of the leaders of the Columbia University strike in 1968 telling women that the cops are so sexually screwed up that if you “pick up your shirt, they won’t know whether to jerk off or go blind.” You have people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin describing their ideological adversaries as “menopausal men.” Basically you have every side accusing the other side of sexual dysfunction because of their ideological disagreements.

Sex was a weapon. Everything was a weapon. During the Kent State situation, which ended with four students being shot by the National Guard, part of the provocation these National Guardsmen felt was that women were looking up their names on their nameplates, calling their wives in Akron, and saying, “Guess what? I’m screwing your man over here at Kent State!”

Even putting a flower in the barrel of a gun is to a certain degree an act of cruelty. If you have someone whose job it is to follow orders and do their duty, and you taunt them for not being able to respond on a human level to an act like that, you’re basically just lording your superiority over them. Love can be a hateful thing..."

a book about Glenn Gould's piano & its tuner

"Having grown so sensitive to sound, many piano tuners couldn't cope with the noisy world. "In the early 20th Century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums," Hafner tells us."

know what else is the berries? my grampy's semi-acclaimed new book of poems The Age of Briggs & Stratton (Hammertown)...

Noise pollution is killing us...

"We got our half-acre lots, and now we have our weed whacker, our leaf blower, our hedge trimmer, our riding lawn mower, and then we hop in our car and drive on four- and six-lane highways past thousands of other suburbs to our place of work, noise -polluting every place we pass."

"LUIS HERNANDEZ from the State of Veracruz works in demolition in New York. He sends 200 dollars a week."

Superheroes

a series by Dulce Pinzon

in NYC a William Holden retrospective--

"They came too late and stayed too long," observed the tagline
introducing Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch." Having arrived at the dawn of a new fatalism in American movies, and inadvertently bowed out as the '70s and the age of the anti-hero ended, Holden's tragic timing was perfect both on-screen and off..."

The Boys and the Subway

from poet James Liddy's

Autobiography

"I am an exile, I am not an exile. "Exile" has enough alienation in it to be a real condition yet it can be read as part of the flashy itinerant supernaturalism of the voyageur. The spirit wandereth whence it is employed or patroned. The artist type is outside the first social force of Mammy and friends; distance beckons new interruptions, and maybe memory spins into backlash.

Writing can seem the activity of alcoholic and
workaholic ghosts; the famous never tired ones, Wilde, Auden, Isherwood used
new domicile and flirtatious cafe in a more exuberant mode than they would at home. Do not dismiss the soldiering in far foreign fields where the battle cry is: do not tire.

The books on the table are piled-up differently: if I had stayed would my life have been changed by John Wieners, Lorine Niedecker,
and above all Jack Spicer? Sitting by a great lake stung by the idea: your
Ireland is dead, clarify your mind..."

via Ron