Frick and Frack Yik and Yak

Frick and Frack yik and yak. 

No doubt most of you are thankful for my silence given last week’s rant. You’re welcome; but silence was not my intention, having brought my laptop with me to New York City to spend Thanksgiving with Roz’s son Bart, who has moved in with his girlfriend of longer than we knew, a Dominican woman with a seven-year-old son, a pocket Junot Diaz, already sardonic - and gifted almost beyond belief. (How could a seven-year-old be sardonic, if he didn’t have the brain and soul of a twenty-seven-year-old?) To spend the holiday with Bart, who has read Oscar Wao and who writes himself, besides the novel he admits he may never finish, three dozen weekly articles for sixteen different English and Spanish Manhattan weeklies, scratched out to pay his half of the rent on a not-half-bad flat in Washington Heights, his half of the food and clothing, as long as they eat cheap, dress cheap, and eliminate most non-necessities.

     I brought my laptop and Gaspar’s email from several days ago with my dilapidated response to this flat of three twenty-seven-year-olds (for Alfredo’s mother, Dominga, was actually born the same day as Bart, May 13, 1989). To these three rooms set up for our comfort, so we slept in Bart and Dominga’s bed, while she slept with Raphael in his bed and Bart kipped on the couch.

We got in late Thanksgiving morning after the briefest of twenty-minute delays at the George Washington Bridge. And Bart and Dominga’s friends, Will and Verónica, came three hours later with the turkey and stuffing and their daughter Leona, Alfredo’s best bud. And we ate turkey and green-bean casserole and something spinach and at least two different somethings sweet potato; mashed potatoes and the stuffing with gravy, and the cranberry chutney we brought; and after, the pies and whipped cream we also brought. And we drank wine from about three till eleven, talking about everything under the Manhattan sun, dusk, and dark.

     Will teaches English at CUNY, and his wife does something quite lucrative at Macy’s. Dominga works for her. And Bart knows Will from a writer’s workshop. Everything: we talked about everything – from politics to football to food to books to languages. (Roz and I are the only ones there not fluent in Spanish. Will spent three years of his adolescence in La Paz; his father was a mining engineer. Verónica is Mexican. And Bart did his Peace Corps stint in Paraguay. Roz and I are the only ones not fluent in Spanish, but her French is very good. My Dutch from my grandparents and a couple of exchange half-years in Amsterdam is passable.) From languages, particularly how they work (and don’t), to living in the City to religion’s fading away until it is only a smudged cloud in the backdrop to politics and football.

No, my intention was to get this posted on Friday, only I forgot my power cord and the damn PC ran out of charge before I could get it done. So you’re welcome, but I’ll apologize – if only to myself – for taking so long to wake you back up. I’ll do it gently. I’ll let Gaspar begin:

Gaspar Stephens 

to me                                                                                                                                          6 days ago

The hate-sown American society you describe may fly around on TV and into practically every corner of the internet, but does it have legs in reality? In the life I walk into and around in day-to-day, I don’t see it, so much hatred among races, ethnicities, varying sexual preferences. (I don’t run into many cowboys or Indians.)  But what I do see is people getting along fairly well with one another.

Only when I turn on a TV, open up a news site, or unfold a paper do I see discord described, or purveyed, perhaps even sown, by people who have a vested interest in profiting from narrative conflict.

This is not to say that there are no conflicts which erupt into hate. But the scope and breadth of hate, I've come to believe, is outlandishly exaggerated.

Begin again: I don’t want to suggest there's no tension and even hatred between various groups, the ones you identify. My point is that there is a media hobgoblin land in which this shit (to use a philosophical term) is highly magnified or amplified, a mediated reality that is almost always considerably different from (read: that exaggerates) our immediate reality.

This brings me to my fascination with our apparent (and appalling) need to embrace exaggerated reality. Perhaps this owes to our living in a society that's numbed by creature comfort.  Maybe we still hold a primal need--one from which our species has not yet evolved--to excite ourselves, to perceive ourselves as in some imminent danger. This seems to be true even when conflict and tension aren't immediately present.

You know how I have embraced “bad coffee Thursday.” (How will we know good coffee if we have no bad to contrast it with?) So down each Thor’s day to the Kwik-Kwak three streets over and one down, where I also buy the local weekly, circulated Tuesday – fifty cents for mostly ads – usually featuring on page 1 faces of smiling white kids that had achieved some minor distinction the previous week, scored a touchdown or learned and demonstrated (and are now seeking to patent) a new technique for applying blush. I could never figure out how the rag kept going, the rack almost always full when I bought mine two days later. Then a couple of weeks ago, I found it empty. “Shallo Shopper finally fold, ay?" I said to the cashier.  "No," he told me, "the front page had a picture of that black guy shot the woman in Licklack Valley; and they sold out in less than an hour."

The moral of the story? Journalism in a "free-market capitalist society" profits from scare-mongering, rage-mongering, from creating a version of reality in which the world is tilted toward destruction, and the tilt is clearly the fault of someone unlike me. Journalism in a “free-market-capitalist society” is like the circus come to town. Only this circus has camped out and is not leaving until it has extracted every nickel from every sucker born every minute. 

Ted Riich

to Gaspar Stephens                                                                                                                    2 days ago

I’m with you – and I want to be with you . . . Or I’m with you until . . . Your fable actually supports my argument. Why does that issue of Shallo Shopper sell out? Because people love to hate. “Say it ain’t so, Gas!” But it is. It still is.

11.30.15

 

God forgive me.

 God forgive me, he ranted.    

                     Back in February, explaining that I didn’t have the guts for it, I turned the “political side” of my vast media empire (two blogs and facebook page) over to my friend Tom Nashe. I didn’t “enjoy my anger enough,” I wrote, “it turns too easily to gall.” Tom wasn’t so bothered by his anger, because – or so he claimed – his politics were non-existent: he belonged to no party, he said, “but the anti-hypocrisy party.” Since Nashe had no web presence, I did (and do) continue to publish Go Around Back, and it was I that prevailed this October upon our mutual (much younger) friend Melchior Ball to join Tom as “drawer,” as he (m ball) calls it. 
     
This is probably not a good time to get back into political commentary; and it’s probably never a good idea to post something written in the middle of a sleepless night, awake in part because I was so damned mad at what Tom had written on Carson, Trump, and Cruz, taking their xenophobia to its logical extremes. Not Tom's intention: he seems to have some patience with these jackasses, but I found I had none. I hated their hate-filled-ness. Worse – here’s what I wrote, only a bit cleaned up for prime time.

Worse, I think I am beginning to hate my country. I haven’t liked “us” in a long time, but I do hate American exceptionalism and American capitalism. The first allows us to be our own moral compass; whatever we say or do must be right, because we say so, we do it. The second has become our form of government. We are no longer a republic but a plutocracy. We are also a hypocrisy, because we have always to pretend we are what we are not; whatever the rest of the world may think, we are never rude, never crude, never unthinking, never a nation of xenophobic jerks.

    But our xenophobia is not only jerky; it has become complete. We hate not only all aliens but anyone remotely alien. It’s not only Syrians we hate – or the Lebanese, or Libyans, or Algerians, or the French for that matter. We hate each other. American men hate American women; American women hate American men. American whites hate American blacks; American blacks hate American whites. American Christians hate American Jews and Muslims and vice versa and versa vice in every permutation. Atheists hate the religious; the religious hate atheists and agnostics; indeed, we have come to loathe anyone that has sinned even once and failed not only to confess but proclaim it, so God could be gracious and we can be the one that said he was.

    Cowboys hate Indians, and Indians hate Cowboys. Everybody hates Hispanics, and they hate one another: the Mexicans hate the Dominicans, the Dominicans hate the Guatemalans, the Guatemalans hate the Ecuadorans and round and round it goes: Cuban Americans despise them all. Everybody including every kind of Hispanic hates Arab-Americans; in fact, they think that is a contradiction in terms; no Arab can be American, never mind that his family has been here 150 years.

    The rich hate the poor, and the poor hate the rich. Democrats hate Republicans – they lie when they say they don’t. And Republicans hate Democrats and are not afraid to say so.

    Gays hate straights almost as much as straights hate gays – perhaps more. Lesbians hate gay men. The transgendered and bisexuals hate everybody; fair enough: everybody hates them.

    We all hate God – not just the atheists among us. (Their hate is actually less than that of the religious.) We hate God the way the most conservative, fundamentalist, macho, narrow-minded father hates his gay son: We say we love him but we wish he were different; he isn’t right, so we put him into re-programming. There are centers, several, in every city, town, and village: there are rural reprogramming centers. Wherever there is a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, there we are reprogramming the God we claim to worship and adore, because frankly God isn't right; God is strange and needs our help. But lest God be dismayed, let God know this: hate-filled Americans of all religious stripes want to help.

    Our most popular entertainers embrace and espouse hate, wanting to help: rappers and Rush Limbaugh; hip-hoppers and Sean Hannity. They pretend they don’t really hate, but those clucks of sympathy you hear in their throats with regard to anyone else: it’s actually gagging.

    We’re all gagging on the antics of the alien. How can he fail so miserably to be us?

That’s where I stopped and got back into bed. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s the problem: once started, it just doesn’t stop – at all.

11.21.15

if you thought the unrecorded sayings of Jesus

 If you thought the unrecorded sayings of Jesus could pass without commentary . . .

      from Farah See’s commentary on The Gospel of Thomas and Other Sayings
      of Jesus (in the Incoherent series, published by Rantrage Press, 2012,
      p. 211) –

The so-called unrecorded sayings of Jesus are often difficult to reconstruct. This one is not. It is certainly some variation of the following:

kai\ ei]pen au00toi=v o( 'Ihsou=v: o(moi&a e!stin h( basilei&a tw~n ou)ranw=n dido&nti a)ndri& a0delfw|~ au)tou= ixqu&n.

   Then Jesus said to them, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who gave his brother a fish.”

Commentary

This is one of the shortest of the parables, very much like Matthew 13:45 – “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls” – about which Petra Bozohoff writes in her commentary on the first gospel. Bozohoff has an advantage we do not; she can read the parable in its larger context, which tells us what Matthew thought the parable must mean when he has the merchant find a pearl of great value, then go and sell all he has and buy it. So Bozohoff can comment further that the parable must be “connected with the supreme worth of the coming reign of Christ,” not, she adds rightly “that that can be purchased.” We have no such context. Still, we can be fairly certain that here Jesus is comparing the kingdom, his reign, to a fish his brother (or sister) could cook and eat. 
     Then we are reminded of the miracle of the loaves and fishes. When we give to one another as Christ gives to us, the gift may be superabundantly multiplied.
     In some ancient manuscripts, the pericope is enlarged to include a comment by Jesus on his own parable: “When asked what the parable meant, he said, ‘I do not know. You may know, someday you will know; but I do not.’” This is certainly a later addition to the parable; it is in no way to be construed as having anything whatsoever to do with what anyone has written about the parable. That includes yours truly. Present-day biblical scholarship often looks like it knows what it is talking about; usually that is a ruse.

more unrecorded sayings of Jesus

November 18, 2015
more unrecorded sayings of Jesus. 

Another parable: “It is like this. A man gave his brother a fish.”

     When asked what the parable meant: “I don’t know. You may know, someday you will know; but I do not.”

“No man died for lack of a comb.”

Mark 13

November 15, 20015 - Last Day for Donuts

Mark 13. The first eight verses are this week’s lectionary passage. I don’t know how many sermons I’ve heard on it – a dozen maybe, or the same sermon a dozen times! We don’t know when the end is coming; no one knows; but we should be ready every day.

Last Day for Donuts

I have taken even more liberties with rendering the passage than I usually do. What the heck: I’m not a scholar, though it’s not as if scholars don’t take liberties, as if they don’t (also) try to make passages – and even particularly this passage - say what they want it to mean.

          Don’t we all know just what Jesus all about? Really! And we know, however he warns us about not being so damn sure and smug about it. How can we know, if he isn’t always entirely sure. That’s what makes him human, incidentally, even if we may think he is also divine (all that hypostatic union stuff): God may be sure, but he, Jesus, is not.

          Jesus does seem to have a pretty good idea, though, about what he wants his followers to do. He tells them in the sermon on the mount, references to which I’ve borrowed into this passage, though I know I shouldn’t have.  (I know that much.)I also get him to quote Lucan, which has to be way, way out of bounds. But so what? This is the TRV – the Ted Riich version; it’s not something God wrote on gold tablets and I simply transcribed.

          So, don’t blame God for it – not that you would. And don’t anyone else for it. I did it, and there’s no committee of scholars brave and true or misguided wretches craven and blue I can hide behind. I’m not hiding. Selah.

_______________
For links to more stories from the TRV, click here.

Jack fell down AND broke his crown.

Apopsicle

“It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people.”

Does no one else find this strange? – Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians: "I’ve heard from a faction among you that there are factions among you." It’s like your mother saying, “Well, that’s what your brother said, and I believe him.” That’ll contribute to family harmony.