Bore, The Whale

Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

This meal just cost me $78 at
the Newark Airport. This is why Amer-
icans think the damn economy is terr-
ible: drowned in unused miles, getting fat
on beers and queers and Russian Kompromat—
what wonder that a simple working square
who wants—what?—wife and simple fare:
PB&J, not “beurre jambon,” and that
is why, from hell’s heart and the Centurion Lounge,
I stab; this almost-erev Yom Kippur I break
my social-media fast, forlornly make
the plea: even in New Jersey, one must scrounge
and scrape a scotch while waiting for a status bump
to first-select. This is what got us Trump.

Oh, Yay!

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

Amid the attacks on the 2023
SCOTUS term I started reading the
significant decisions, and: I liked them, duh.
It’s true they don’t pertain at all to me:
I haven’t got a womb, and I am free
from past discrimination’s algebra
of sundown’s trade for safety, inshallah;
I am not married, but could always be.
Hysterics is the art of wanting more
than past tradition binds to boundaries now
so well-won, worn, and granted they are no
more needed: what present-sounding horror
can cakeless fags, and Blacks, and pregnant sows
claim that’s worse than my discomfort, bro?

Fishers of Men

Art, Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
–Justice Samuel Alito

And I was asked whether I would like to fly
there in a seat that, as far as I
am aware, would have otherwise been vacant.
O! Pale Alaskan sky! O! noctivagant
permafrosted critics of the fourth estate
who would tear down the stars to punish great,
deserving men: dear honest, worthy friend
I barely know—Temerity! to send
to me, mere umpire, damned and stinking sulphurous
lists of did I this? or did I that?—
What man, born under Christ’s blood-borne domain,
his rod in hand, a Peter, under fulgurous
flashing sky, would let some man-shaped rat
inquire about pecuniary gain?

L’Article 49.3

Culture, Economy, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

I never understood the French desire
to retire as soon as possible and then
live on. I thought I’d work until the end,
each day arising to the orange bankèd fire,
a silken full-length gown—my work attire;
my blistered fingers to their plow: a pen;
a morning hour’s work, a nap, again
a forty-minute afternoon; then hire
an ungrateful ex-colonial Uber driver
to bus my wife and I from our chateaux
into some village’s pretty pristine square
for the entrecôte reward of any striver
and a glass or ten of ’96 Margaux—
for if I did not labor, I’d despair.

And You Shall Love

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

“If you do not drive your neighborhood or region, what form of adult mastery and knowledge are you seeking in its place? If you do not drive your country’s highways and byways, what path do you have to a nonvirtual experience of the America beyond your class and tribe and bubble?” – Ross Douthat

If you do not drive your neighborhood
or region, what form of adult mastery
and knowledge are you seeking in its place?
What dallying god of degenerated pace
shall plaster his defunct phylactery
on your pedestrian brow, and call it good
to bike to CVS? To what worthless
walk in the woods or chittering crowded train
would you avail yourself in prayer to seal
your social order? Yet behind the wheel
of some bland Hyundai running reds on Main
you become yourself a god, mirthless
and grand: infinite; callous; cruel
as a child roused too soon for middle school.

This Man’s Art and that Man’s Cope

Art, Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Culture, Economy, Education, Media, The Life of the Mind

I only have eyes for my beautiful wife, who has been
corrupted by the greed of centralized
fiat currency; she has unrealized
my gains and cut me off from kith and kin.
Such fungible affections are a sin!
No future fortune ought to be despised,
pre-disgraced in skeptical women’s eyes
when man plus NFT must equal win.
What godlike power in one single gif:
from central bank to senator, each fears
the power of the yeoman farmer finally able
to transubstantiate a hieroglyph
through random numbers and the faith of Twitter peers
into un-money whose value is unstable.

Labor Rites

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Science, Uncategorized, War and Politics

Every job will be automated until four remain:
lawyer, farmer, dentist, soda jerk;
whaleman, scrivener, and grocery clerk;
rabbi, car mechanic, David Blaine;
professional impersonator of Mark Twain.
The rest will be done by one Mechanical Turk
with an indefatigable appetite for work;
its million metal arms will never strain;
its million pinprick eyes will never droop;
of course, it’s operated by an actual man
from a windowless room in drowning Bangladesh;
he gets one thirty second break to poop
and eat his lunch before the beautiful tan
attack dogs are released to tear his flesh.

Byzantium

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, Uncategorized, War and Politics

geriatric

Geriatric millennials born
between 1980 and 1985
are best positioned to lead teams that will thrive
in the hybrid workplace; they will never mourn
the lost kitchenette, or get mad at the porn
their OnlyFans teammates left on the shared drive
while fooling eye-movement monitors during a live
webinar; well-trained in irony and scorn,
they’ll do their boomer bosses’ bidding, but
half-heartedly; they’re busy making .gifs,
polluting the Slack with fake nostalgia for
the nineties, pretending they don’t mind the gut
they’ve got from crafty IPAs and spliffs,
barely forty at death’s beatific door

Principia Mathematica

Books and Literature, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Science, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

We’ve got to get checks of fourteen hundred bucks
on top of the six hundred that we’ve already sent;
thirty times twenty that the proles have already spent;
seventy Jacksons for all the lazy fucks.
Sure we said two grand. [Rolls eyes, and ducks.]
Savvy citizens knew what it meant:
one down payment and then one month of rent.
Have we mentioned how much the Republican Party sucks?
Even your saintly Sanders now agrees,
and would you gainsay your wintry mittened-man
by means-testing current truths against the past
positions changed for new realities
gestated in your short attention span?
Enjoy the money. It will be your last.

The Worst Amendment

Books and Literature, Culture, Economy, Poetry, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

This could not be more Orwellian.
Simon & Schuster is cancelling my book.
Where a business-flyer otherwise would look
for such civics, now shelves the Machiavellian
secrets of the boardroom, or Hudson’s selling him
mere Mentos. The woke mob won’t brook
my bold dissent. Why? Because I took
my voters’ insurrectionary whim
seriously? My job is to ventriloquize
exactly what the lumpen want to hear,
smuggling their sordid gripes into the fort-
ress of power with my Yale mouth and dead eyes,
alchemizing gripes into career.
This aggression will not stand. See you in court.