"What wine is best?," Diogenes was asked. "The wine another buys you," replied the Master. Please, if this blog has opened your eyes to your sinful way of life, if I have made you see how corrupt is our Bondage to Wealth in our so-called Free Market, or Social Capital Market, please pay your enlightenment forward by buying this poor Beggar a beer!
I am so thirsty - as thirsty, Dear Potential Client, for beer as you are for meaning in your God-forsaken life. Give me the beer and I will give your life meaning. But give me the beer first.
No Full Service Bank, no matter how well staffed with Senior Philanthropic Consultants, no matter how dedicated to the public interest, will make this offer. One Goddamn beer! Who else will give your life meaning that cheap? No takers? OK. Forget the beer. I will plan the meaning of your life, Mr. Bigshot, for nothing. I have an open space on my calendar, as it happens. Just let me sit in the limo while we do it, ok? It is cold out here on the street.
Head over to Open Mic Night at www.successful-blog.com tonight after 7pm CST. Fat Tire beer will be flowing. . .
Posted by: J. Erik Potter | February 12, 2008 at 07:06 PM
"The rules are simple — be nice. Do be nice. :)" I prefer beer flowing riotously from the cask Rabelais has broached for us.
Posted by: phil | February 13, 2008 at 08:59 AM
Beer? Though I risk betraying my German ancestors, I have to say in vino veritas.
Posted by: Jeff Trexler | February 13, 2008 at 09:16 AM
Jeff, thanks, blogged the link.
Posted by: phil | February 13, 2008 at 11:39 AM
Glad you liked it! It's one of my favorites. Years ago I memorized & wrote translations of a number of Blok's poems, with the notion of submitting a proposal for a new English translation of his selected works. Then I started practicing law and, alas, set it aside. Maybe someday . . .
Posted by: Jeff Trexler | February 13, 2008 at 12:27 PM
I'm currently enaged in a refusal to work, which means I can drink a lot of beer and read a lot of books instead of collaborating with monied interests in the furtherance of a subjectivization aimed in "my" general direction. I borrowed Bakhtin's "Rabelais and His World" from the public library yesterday. It wasn't on the shelf, it had to be retrieved from storage. One of the reference librarians warned me that the odds it could found were remote. When the intern sent to retrieve it returned with the copy, the librarians exclaimed with wonderment. One said the book had been on hand for 40 years and no one had ever borrowed it. "Please promise me you will check out this book," she said, which I presume meant that doing so would preserve it - for another few decades perhaps - from sale or destruction, and from a complete exile from immediate public access in this vicinity (you can buy out of print copies on Amazon, but they don't arrive in five minutes, yet).
Posted by: herecomesnobody | February 13, 2008 at 08:03 PM
Mr. Nobody, welcome to the carnival. Bakhtin himself when paper was scarce under Stalin, used some of his manuscripts to roll his cigarettes, so he would appreciate your preserving a copy from destruction.
Posted by: phil | February 14, 2008 at 08:38 AM
You should probably keep it to preserve it. Tell the librarian to drop you a note if anyone else calls for it. Offer them a quarter for it.
Posted by: Gerry | February 14, 2008 at 09:51 AM
Sad, isn't it? Bahktin is perhaps one of the three most influential critics and theoriests of the 20th century, and the one from whom we can learn most, perhaps, as we enter our own dark time under surveillance. My sense is that he wrote partly in code. "Weapons of the weak." Carnival was presented as coming up from "the people," a good Communist concept. But in reality, Bakhtin was writing about the subversion of life-denying hierarchy by the energies of the body, and the pleasures of conviviality, and the dissolving power of laughter (comic, satiric, boisterous). Bakhtin would have wanted his own Otafuku, the Shinto goddess of drink and laughter. I and conviviality. I don't know if he ever wrote about Falstaff, but Falstaff is of that tradition too, I think, a lord of misrule who speaks for the flesh and what makes us all human, King and Pauper alike.
Posted by: phil | February 14, 2008 at 11:30 AM
Pissed as a family fart.
Posted by: Ambitious Bruces | February 16, 2008 at 11:06 PM
Works better probably over a glass of beer than a cup of morning coffee, but Monty Python is indeed sorely missed.
Posted by: phil | February 17, 2008 at 09:31 AM
Yeah. I actually lost my sense of humor the other day. I couldn't will it back. So I stopped trying, just paused. Not hilarious, but OK.
Posted by: Ambitious Bruces | February 17, 2008 at 12:13 PM