“You don’t think I should encour­age her in her art courses, Mr. Wilde?” said Marquis.

“Don’t be an ass, Mar­quis,” said the painter. “Keep her at it until the day she mar­ries. The Vic­to­ri­ans, at whom we sneer, knew the value of wrap­ping a girl in the cot­ton wadding of aes­thetic stud­ies. It’s the only way to keep fresh the sparkle of her igno­rance, virginity’s chief charm. A girls’ school today sul­lies and dulls young females to a middle-aged famil­iar­ity with sex machin­ery and domes­tic man­age­ment before they have been authen­ti­cally kissed. Let her paint or sing or write until she charms and weds a young man as rich and untal­ented as her­self. Only, in all char­ity, never expose her prod­ucts again to a man of taste. They are puppy yappings.”

p. 178

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“All of the past is but the begin­ning of a begin­ning; all that the human mind has accom­plished is but the dream before the awak­en­ing.” — H.G. Wells

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“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

–Troilus and Cres­sida, Act 1, Scene 2

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These are the words of Chi­nese Zen mas­ter Lay­man P’ang (c. 740–808 A.D.) as writ­ten in George Leonard’s Mastery:

My daily affairs are quite ordi­nary;
but I’m in total har­mony with them.
I don’t hold on to any­thing, don’t reject any­thing;
nowhere an obsta­cle or con­flict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poor­est thing shines.
My mirac­u­lous power and spir­i­tual activ­ity:
draw­ing water and car­ry­ing wood.

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This poem by Wal­lace Stevens recounts the details of a wake for a dead woman. I love the con­sci­en­tious poetry of the poem, the dec­o­ra­tions (“…kitchen cups con­cu­pis­cent curds”), the con­di­tion­als (“let…”),and the dec­la­ra­tions (“The only emperor is…”). Let being be the end of seem­ing. I know no tighter phrase for the enig­matic cage that is a mind with a body.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cig­ars,
The mus­cu­lar one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups con­cu­pis­cent curds.
Let the wenches daw­dle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flow­ers in last month’s news­pa­pers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lack­ing the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroi­dered fan­tails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet pro­trude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

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In Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage, George Orwell writes: A scrupu­lous writer, in every sen­tence that he writes, will ask him­self at least four ques­tions, thus: 1. What am I try­ing to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will prob­a­bly ask him­self two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said any­thing that is avoid­ably ugly?

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I’ll let the title of the fol­low­ing pas­sage from The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Mark Twain sum­ma­rize it:

Mr Clemens com­ments on the killing of six hun­dred Moros–Men, women, and children–In a crater bowl near Jolo in the Philippines–Our troops com­manded by Gen­eral Wood–Contrasts this “bat­tle with var­i­ous other details our mil­i­tary history…

We will stop talk­ing about my school­mates of sixty years ago, for the present, and return to them later. They strongly inter­est me, and I am not going to leave them alone per­ma­nently. Strong as that inter­est is, it is for the moment pushed out of the way by an inci­dent of to-day, which is still stronger. This inci­dent burst upon the world last Fri­day in an offi­cial cable­gram from the com­man­der of our forces in the Philip­pines to our Gov­ern­ment at Wash­ing­ton. The sub­stance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark skinned sav­ages, had for­ti­fied them­selves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hos­tiles, and bit­ter against us because we have been try­ing for eight years to take their lib­er­ties away from them, their pres­ence in that posi­tion was a men­ace. Our com­man­der, Gen­eral Leonard Wood, ordered a recon­nais­sance. It was found that the Moros num­bered six hun­dred, count­ing women and chil­dren; that their crater bowl was in the sum­mit of a peak or moun­tain twenty-two hun­dred feet above sea level, and very dif­fi­cult of access for Chris­t­ian troops and artillery. Then Gen­eral Wood ordered a sur­prise, and went along him­self to see the order car­ried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devi­ous and dif­fi­cult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not spec­i­fied, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp accliv­ity by tackle a dis­tance of some three hun­dred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the bat­tle began. Our sol­diers num­bered five hun­dred and forty. They were assisted by aux­il­iaries con­sist­ing of a detach­ment of native con­stab­u­lary in our pay–their num­bers not given–and by a naval detach­ment, whose num­bers are not stated. But appar­ently the con­tend­ing par­ties were about equal as to number–six hun­dred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hun­dred men, women and chil­dren in the bot­tom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, fifty feet.

Gen­eral Wood’s order was “Kill or cap­ture the six hundred.”

The bat­tle began–it is offi­cially called by that name [battle]–our forces fir­ing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of pre­ci­sion; the sav­ages furi­ously return­ing the fire, prob­a­bly with brickbats–though this is merely a sur­mise of mine, as the weapons used by the sav­ages are not nom­i­nated in the cable­gram. Hereto­fore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly also inef­fec­tual trade-muskets when they had any.

The offi­cial report stated that the bat­tle was fought with prodi­gious energy on both sides dur­ing a day and a half, and that it ended with a com­plete vic­tory for the Amer­i­can arms. The com­plete­ness of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this fact: that of the six hun­dred Moros not one was left alive. The bril­liancy of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hun­dred heroes only fif­teen lost their lives.

Gen­eral Wood was present and look­ing on. His order had been “Kill or cap­ture those sav­ages.” Appar­ently our lit­tle army con­sid­ered that the “or” left them autho­riza­tion to kill or cap­ture accord­ing to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there–the taste of Chris­t­ian butchers.

The offi­cial report quite prop­erly extolled and mag­ni­fied the “hero­ism” and “gal­lantry” of our troops; lamented the loss of the fif­teen who per­ished, and elab­o­rated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suf­fered injury, and even minutely and faith­fully described the nature of the wounds, in the inter­est of future his­to­ri­ans of the United States. It men­tioned that a pri­vate had one of his elbows scraped by a mis­sile, and the private’s name was men­tioned. Another pri­vate had the end of his nose scraped by a mis­sile. His name was also mentioned–by cable, at one dol­lar and fifty cents a word.

Next day’s news con­firmed the pre­vi­ous day’s report and named our fif­teen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now con­sider two or three details of our mil­i­tary his­tory. In one of the great bat­tles of the Civil War 10 per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Water­loo, where four hun­dred thou­sand men were present on the two sides, fifty thou­sand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leav­ing three hun­dred and fifty thou­sand sound and all right for fur­ther adven­tures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic com­edy called the Cuban war was played, we sum­moned two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men. We fought a num­ber of showy bat­tles, and when the war was over we had lost two hun­dred and sixty-eight men out of our two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just four­teen times as many by the gal­lantry of the army doc­tors in the hos­pi­tals and camps. We did not exter­mi­nate the Spaniards–far from it. In each engage­ment we left an aver­age of 2 per cent of the enemy killed or crip­pled on the field.

Con­trast these things with the great sta­tis­tics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hun­dred engaged on each side, we lost fif­teen men killed out­right, and we had thirty-two wounded–counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy num­bered six hundred–including women and children–and we abol­ished them utterly, leav­ing not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incom­pa­ra­bly the great­est vic­tory that was ever achieved by the Chris­t­ian sol­diers of the United States.

pgs 403–404

More Mark Twain quotes can be found here: http://www.twainquotes.com/

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Mark Twain ordered that his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, which he had been dic­tat­ing for a num­ber of years to a stenog­ra­pher friend, not be pub­lished until a hun­dred years after his death. Since he died in 1910, his auto­bi­og­ra­phy was released last year. It is a gift to be alive now to read it with­out a sin­gle tread of another foot on its pages. Here is one para­graph. More to come soon:

It is a world of sur­prises. They fall, too, where one is least expect­ing of them. When I intro­duced Sell­ers into the book, Charles Dud­ley Warner, who was writ­ing the story with me, pro­posed a change of Sellers’s Chris­t­ian name. Ten years before, in a remote cor­ner of the West, he had come across a man named Eschol Sell­ers, and he thought that Eschol was just the right and fit­ting name for our Sell­ers, since it was odd, and quaint, and all that. I liked the idea, but I said that that man might turn up and object. But Warner said it couldn’t hap­pen; that he was doubt­less dead by this time, a man with a name like that couldn’t live long; and be he dead or alive we must have the name, it was exactly the right one and we couldn’t do with­out it. So the change was made. Warner’s man was a farmer in a cheap and hum­ble way. When the book had been out a week, a college-bred gen­tle­man of courtly man­ners and ducal uphol­stery arrived in Hart­ford in a sul­try state of mind and with a libel suit in his eye, and his name was Eschol Sell­ers! He had never heard of the other one, and had never been within a thou­sand miles of him. This dam­aged aristocrat’s pro­gram was quite def­i­nite and business-like: the Amer­i­can Pub­lish­ing Com­pany must sup­press the edi­tion as far as printed, and change the name in the plates, or stand a suit for $10,000. He car­ried away the Company’s promise and many apolo­gies, and we changed the name back to Colonel Mul­berry Sell­ers, in the plates. Appar­ently there is noth­ing that can­not hap­pen. Even the exis­tence of two unre­lated men wear­ing the impos­si­ble name of Eschol Sell­ers is a pos­si­ble thing.

p. 207

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Phillipe Bour­gois wrote In Search of Respect: Sell­ing Crack in El Bar­rio, an ethno­graphic study of crack deal­ers in East Harlem, where he lived for five years, befriend­ing the deal­ers and tape record­ing thou­sands of hours of their con­ver­sa­tion. In this pas­sage, Bour­gois explains the con­text in which crack was invented and how it came to dom­i­nate the under­ground economy:

The demise of Mafia hege­mony on the street occurred just as the under­ground econ­omy was redefin­ing itself around cocaine and crack in the mid-1980s, which were sup­plant­ing heroin as the undis­put­edly most prof­itable prod­uct. The vigor of the crack-cocaine econ­omy dur­ing the late 1980s and early 1990s was largely the result of an aggres­sive fed­eral drug pol­icy pri­or­i­tiz­ing the crim­i­nal repres­sion of smug­gling. Some­time in the early to mid-1980s, mar­i­juana importers work­ing the Latin Amer­i­can sup­ply routes adapted to the esca­lat­ing lev­els of search-and-seizure they were fac­ing at U.S. bor­ders by switch­ing from trans­port­ing mar­i­juana to traf­fick­ing in cocaine. Cocaine is much eas­ier to trans­port clan­des­tinely because it takes up only a frac­tion of the phys­i­cal space occu­pied by the equiv­a­lent dol­lar value of mar­i­juana. U.S. inner cities con­se­quently were flooded with high-purity cocaine at bar­gain prices shortly after the fed­eral gov­ern­ment increased drug inter­dic­tion efforts. Accord­ing to the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion, the kilo price of cocaine dropped five­fold dur­ing the 1980s from $80,000 to $15,000.

The Columbian orga­nized crime car­tels who have his­tor­i­cally main­tained a monopolly over cocaine pro­duc­tion and trans­port, responded vig­or­ously to the new mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties in the early 1980s and vio­lently bypassed the tra­di­tional net­works of the Italian-dominated Mafia that spe­cial­ized in heroin. The Columbians tapped directly into the entre­pre­neur­ial urge that is such an inte­gral facet of the Amer­i­can Dream. The magic of a highly com­pet­i­tive mar­ket spawned a new, more prof­itable prod­uct — crack, which is…merely an alloy of cocaine and bak­ing soda. The admix­ture of bak­ing soda, how­ever, allows the psy­choac­tive agent in cocaine to be released when smoked. Pow­der cocaine, on the other hand, can only be sniffed or injected. The cap­il­lar­ies in the lungs have a great absorp­tion capac­ity than the arter­ies of the mus­cu­loskele­tal sys­tem or the veins of the nos­trils. Con­se­quently, crack deliv­ers the psy­choac­tive effects of cocaine to the brain with max­i­mum effi­ciency and speed. Fur­ther­more, within min­utes of smok­ing crack users crave another exhil­a­rat­ing rush of 2 min­utes and a half. They are not con­tent with the sub­tler, longer-term high that comes from sniff­ing pow­der cocaine. This makes crack a per­fectly flex­i­ble con­sumer com­mod­ity. Even though indi­vid­ual doses are inex­pen­sive and there­fore acces­si­ble to the poor, a user with money can spend vir­tu­ally infi­nite sums in a sin­gle extended ses­sion of bing­ing. This tech­no­log­i­cal and mar­ket­ing break­through of alloy­ing cocaine to bak­ing soda unleashed the energy of thou­sands of wanna-be mom-and-pop entre­pre­neurs who were only too eager to estab­lish high-profit, high-risk retail crack busi­nesses. Hence, in late 1985, the Game Room, which had been a strug­gling candy store sell­ing nickel bags of mar­i­juana, upgraded itself to become a video arcade pur­vey­ing $10 vials of crack.

pgs 74–75

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Phillipe Bour­gois wrote In Search of Respect: Sell­ing Crack in El Bar­rio, an ethno­graphic study of crack deal­ers in East Harlem, where he lived for five years, befriend­ing the deal­ers and tape record­ing thou­sands of hours of their con­ver­sa­tion. In this pas­sage, Bour­gois sits with Primo, the man­ager of a crack house called the Game Room, and his assis­tant, Cae­sar, as they explain why they deal:

[Primo and Cae­sar] were usu­ally fired from [entry-level ser­vice sec­tor] jobs, but they treated their return to the world of street deal­ing as a tri­umph of free will and resis­tance on their part. A straight­for­ward refusal to be exploited in the legal labor mar­ket pushes them into the crack econ­omy and into sub­stance abuse. At the same time, how­ever, becom­ing a crack seller is by no means the vol­un­tar­ily tri­umphal­ist deci­sion that many street deal­ers claim it to be. Beneath [Primo’s] out­rage over the bad work­ing con­di­tions he was offered, lay a deep fear that his biggest prob­lem is incom­pe­tence and laziness.

Primo: [while crush­ing cocaine in a dol­lar bill in the back of the Game Room] That fuckin’ lady coun­selor I got; she’s a stu­pid bitch. She wanted me to be like a secu­rity guard, you know. I don’t wanta be no guard. I don’t wanta deal with some crazy son of a bitch out­side. I let them rob any­thing. Word! All I got is a stick in my hand. And I’m only get­ting paid once a week. I let them rob any­thing, man.

That fuck­ing coun­selor she tells me [imi­tat­ing a bureau­cratic whine], “The bet­ter your qual­i­fi­ca­tions, the bet­ter the work.” Well fuck her, I’ll just keep search­ing on my own.

I had an appoint­ment yes­ter­day, a com­pany that I was sup­posed to check out that takes care of like sheets and stuff, like from hotels–room ser­vice. So I went to see, just to take a look at it; but there’s a lot of Mex­i­cans in there, and I’m not a fuck­ing Mexican.

My cousin’s got a job where he’s been work­ing for like three years. He told me last week, “Come with me tomor­row morn­ing to talk to the boss.” But it didn’t work out. I over­slept. I had even set up the clock, but I didn’t hear the alarm [sniff­ing cocaine].

Philippe: Why don’t you just take any old bull­shit job just for right now? Like what your sister’s got at McDonald’s.

Primo: You know why I don’t fly to work real quick? I am twenty-six years old, and if I was to fly out of my way and get a McDonald’s job and not no union job, it just shows that you’re fly­ing to get a McDonald’s to cover your ass.

Twenty-six-year-old guy at McDonald’s! Every time you go to McDonald’s, you don’t see any­body twenty-six years old.

Every time that you see some­one that’s older, it’s prob­a­bly because they don’t have no edu­ca­tion; no high school; no noth­ing. They don’t speak Eng­lish. I mean my Eng­lish is very bad, but I can go fur­ther than at Burger King.

Philippe: Man! You’re just mak­ing up excuses.

Cae­sar: [inter­rupt­ing, almost angry at me] You know what I call work­ing at a Burger King or a McDonald’s? That’s what I call slavery-ing.

I know, because I worked there, and work­ing at McDonald’s is over­worked and under­paid. You could work full time–a week, five days a week–full time, and you only come home with like a hun­dred forty, one thirty.

And you know why it’s fucked up? It’s not only because it’s over­worked and under­paid; it’s that you have to–I mean when I talk about over­worked and underpaid!–you have to fuckin’ fry burg­ers; scrub the floors; because you have to do so much work for bull­shit money.

[sud­denly reach­ing for the dol­lar bill with cocaine and chang­ing his seri­ous tone to a smirk] The only rea­son why I don’t get a decent job is because I’m lazy. I don’t want to go through the processes.

I don’t want to go look­ing for no bull­shit job and be all frus­trated and be get­ting paid weak and shit like that, until some­thing else comes along.

‘Cause think about it; if you got a bull­shit job; how you gonna go look for another one? Cause you gonna be there at the job all the time. And why you wanna be miss­ing a day of your work to go see an inter­view so they could tell you, “We’ll call you.”

[motion­ing to Primo to dip his key in the pile of cocaine] Yo! Feed me Primo!

And then you lose a day’s pay which makes you move more to the brink of hell ’cause then you don’t got money for drugs. [grin­ning wildly before sniff­ing from the key tip full of cocaine that Primo was hold­ing up to his left nos­tril] And if I can’t get high the way I want to be on the weekends…[sniffing again, loud mutual laughter]

Philippe: Okay! Okay! [Cae­sar], I hear you. But seri­ously Primo, you got a court case com­ing up.

Primo: [sniff­ing and recom­pos­ing him­self] Yes, I am mak­ing excuses, but I’ll go to the job cen­ter on Mon­day and fol­low up. I think I had just got used to the street scene, because it’s been a while since I’ve held a legal job that’s been there.

I didn’t like the tuxedo place they sent me to last week. I didn’t want to be mea­sur­ing men. It’s not for me to be touch­ing men all over the place like that. That’s wack!

At the same time I shoulda stayed for more than two weeks. That was just not the whole excuse. My prob­lem was that I was hang­ing out late at the Game Room and I’ve got to wake up in the morn­ing to get to work.

Cae­sar: [reas­sur­ingly] Naah. I vis­ited the store, it wasn’t no place to make a career.

Primo: [morosely] I was just fuck­ing up. I made a choice from there to here and I’m still here.

Cae­sar: Yeah, I’m lazy right now, ’cause I just want to get up at any fuck­ing cho­sen time of the day. Wash my balls and go out­side with a fat belly from all the grub in my house and go hang out and write [rap] rhymes and bug out upstairs and make my lit­tle bull­shit money.

See, I stay out of trou­ble in a way by sell­ing crack, ’cause I chill with Primo. [motion­ing to Primo to serve him more cocaine] See, what fucked me up before when I was work­ing legal was, I was using the crack. That was the only thing that fucked me up.

‘Cause really, I’m happy with my life. [sniff­ing] Like no one is both­er­ing me. I got my respect back.

Buela [grandma] likes me. I got a woman. I got a kid. I feel com­plete now. I don’t really need noth­ing. I got money to get wrecked. [sniff­ing again] I just go down­stairs and work for Pops, and I ain’t tak­ing none of it home because tomor­row I don’t need no money. So I’ll go get wrecked, but then tomor­row I don’t need no money, ’cause I go back to the Game Room: I work; I get the money; and then I can go get wrecked again. [point­ing to Primo, who was dip­ping his key back into the cocaine.]

Philippe: [laugh­ing] That’s why your sneak­ers are so dirty?

Cae­sar: Only rea­son I ain’t got nice new sneak­ers is ’cause I have a deci­sion: I could either save the money to buy the sneak­ers, or I could get wrecked. And right now, I’m going to get wrecked. [sniff­ing again]

The money I make in the Game Room is for my per­sonal mad­ness; for my per­sonal drug-addiction and self-destruction. It’s some­thing only I could con­trol. No one could tell me what to do with it.

[break­ing into a tirade] So I could hurt myself on the inside; so I could wake up every morn­ing with my stom­ach twisted all in knots and throw­ing up and sick; and I can’t eat; and I can’t breathe and I’m fulla’ diar­rhea; and I’m shit­ting all over the place; and I’m fucked up; and my one eye is pink; and one eye is white; and my hair stinks; and I’m dirty; and I don’t bathe; and I’m fucked up; and I stink; and I hate my woman; and I hate every­body in the morn­ing. That’s what hap­pens to me after I get wrecked. [sniff­ing again]

But then I’ll chill; and I’ll be sick; and I’ll puke; and I’ll be cool by the time I get to the Game Room. Then we’re hav­ing a good time; we’re break­ing shit [point­ing to where the tele­vi­sion used to be, then open­ing the door of the Game Room for a cus­tomer who had knocked]. We’re has­sling cus­tomers; we’re curs­ing cus­tomers. Curs­ing cus­tomers in Span­ish in front of them; fuck­ing with their minds; sell­ing them garbage drugs so we can make our money [col­lect­ing ten dol­lars and hand­ing over two crack vials]; and so we can go out and buy garbage drugs [point­ing to the folded dol­lar bill full of cocaine bal­anced on Primo’s knee]; and get ripped our­selves; and talk immense amount of shit [point­ing to my tape recorder].

Pgs 117–119

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