Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Sunday 30 June 2013

There's no such thing as Liberation

Nelson Mandela,
once imprisoned by a régime
on an island,
is now imprisoned by celebrity.
A government who wished him dead
has been replaced by one
which will not let him die.

Education-systems

Pupils
who aren't successfully
stupefied, infected
are cast aside,
degraded and rejected.


Plants in my Attic

My lovely, lonely, gentle,
grungily-flamboyant
cannabistic-wino friend,
who lives on a 'social welfare' pittance
no greater than my own,
frets about the size and performance of his penis,
is terrified of tenderness,
has a lovely hairy dog
called Bébé, Doudou or Stan,
and grows Grass for his unlimited consumption,
was arrested for driving an uninsured
car without a licence (not his first offence)
- and with THC in his bloodstream.

Upon inspection,
his tattered identity-card was four years
out of date. He is one
of the law-enforcers' more gratifying cases.
Since he cannot possibly
pay the inevitable large fine, he faces
confinement in a centre of correction.
He said to me, sadly, smiling:
Life is just one long rejection.


Saturday 29 June 2013

"Mindless Violence"

- why is it worse
than mindful violence
(by the police, or an
occupying army, for example) ?

British Armed Forces Day

The people which gave the word
Gentleman
to the world
was (of course)* never known for its gentleness
and rarely for its gentility.
In fact, it's hard to say which was more evil,
more destructive, genocidal,
more continually aggressive:
the Roman, or the British Empire.
Today at war as usual, the British
"honour their armed forces"
(trained killers and their cohorts),
and wallow in  un-Roman hypocrisy.

I'd rather join the Taliban
than be a British Gentleman.

*an example of enantiodromia

The Fall

The obvious reason
for The Expulsion from
The Garden
was the Blasphemy
of Weeding.

Thursday 27 June 2013

There are two remarkably good things

about Ireland:
1) its megaliths
2) Ryanair.

True incapacity

is the inability
(mental or paralytical)
to kill yourself
when you have had
enough of pain
and life has had
enough of you.

Wednesday 26 June 2013

Tuesday 25 June 2013

Art

is creation of litter
and a pleasant distraction
from the pleasant distraction
of dying.

Are ALL questions stupid ?

The Three Big, Silly Questions :
where did we/the world/the universe come from ?
why are we here ?
where, if anywhere, do we go after death ?

Monday 24 June 2013

Diversity-song

There's a blonde building bombs in the basement,
and a guy growing grass up the stairs.
And I'm in between writing poems -
such marvellous things are house-shares!

Oscar Wilde

'feasted with panthers' -
but it was dull and vicious ungulates
who did for him.

Sunday 23 June 2013

Selective Gender-bending

Although they favour male singers with high voices
and female singers who sound like men,
people from the Middle East
prefer rigidly gender-indicating,
non-androgynous dress
even more than Europeans do.
Varied, interchangeable, comfortable
open-to-choice, unisex apparel
(djellabas, shalwar-kameez, saris,
or for that matter gaily-decorated burqas)
may (distressingly) never come to pass.

Saturday 22 June 2013

Enjoying life

During my mildly-Presbyterian childhood
I was told that Nobody Gets What They Want
In/Out of Life - and if they do, They Don't Enjoy It.
All I wanted was to be left alone much of the time,
and, through wanted (perhaps wanton) failure
to be like others of my time and background,
it came to pass.  And I enjoy it greatly.

The contours of virtue

are formed by adversity -
but, confronted by all the evil
in the world, perhaps the worst
you can do is to survive.

Friday 21 June 2013

A variant

'The goat is dangerous from the front, the horse from behind...'
the vulture from above, the shark from below -
but from all sides, and from a thousand miles away
the human can deliver a dreadful death-blow.

What's your name, dear ?


May it be said repeatedly

that the wanton wastefulness of the rich*,
obscene and vast and immature,
is many times more reprehensible,
more criminal,
than the petty thieving of the poor.

(Few things are more ineluctably unfair
than a system of 'justice'.)

*Many of 'the poor' in the rich countries
  are wasteful, and thus are rich.

Thursday 20 June 2013

Mothercare

In the rich countries
where there are no longer diphtheria, TB,
scarlet fever, whooping-cough, mumps
or even measles,
mothers worry about a child's headache.

For the millions

who believe they will go to a heaven,
life is a state of suspended anticipation.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Del Espectro Nocturno

for guitar and pre-recorded tape
by Juan Piñera 

- a cassette-recording taken from a BBC Radio 3 broadcast
(in the early 1990s) of pieces from the  
Havana International Guitar Festival of the previous year.





















click on the painting above by Malcolm Walker
and on the subsequent enlargement to listen,
or click here to listen without an image.

Juan Piñera was born in Havana in 1949, and was one of the founders
of the Cuban Laboratório Nacional de Música Electroacústica.

I discovered that this marvellous, atmospheric piece is not on YouTube,
not recorded commercially,  nor could I find it elsewhere on the web,
so I uploaded as an mp3 file  it to Grooveshark.

There is much mention of male rôle-models

for boys in our culture
which, uniquely, has
no rites of passage.
But, whereas most mothers
are fairly good mothers,
most fathers are bad fathers.
So I am proud that my
rôle-model was not male,
but was my single, working,
loving, encouraging, thoughtful,
well-organised, prudent
and utterly reliable mother. 

No matter that I couldn't
handle a screwdriver
until I reached puberty.
I acquired or inherited
her admirable characteristics
(described above)
as well as her naivety.

No amount of Applied Science
or Technology
will enable us to choose our fathers.
Only a Really Good Man
such as Walt Whitman
or a magnificent one
such as the great Süleyman
would have been good enough for me.

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Fear + cruelty = power.

All power is fearful,
but not all power is cruel -
though cruelty loves
a system of 'justice'.

Optimism

is Love's sister -
and just as pushy,
as obsessive, and
as solipsistic.

Small Gloss on a Little Poem by Elizabeth Bishop

Love is just a burning boy
Love is just a flaming deck
Love is just a hormone's ploy
Love is just a sinking wreck.

Monday 17 June 2013

Better than CGI
























Dark Lord Mantis by Dermal Denticles on Flickr.
re-blogged from http://eduardo-.tumblr.com/

Not Suitable for the Workplace (blue-collar only)

According to a Swedish survey,
60% of on-line purchases are made,
and 70% of porn is watched,
but not necessarily downloaded,
by men supposed to be doing desk-work,
in management-positions, government departments, etc.

What is the function of pornography
for those who have too much time on their hands ?
I suspect that it is watched by those who are too stupid
to watch anything better, but clever enough to know
that if they worked full-time chaos would ensue. 

Roland Paulson: Empty Labor: Subjectivity and Idleness at Work

Sunday 16 June 2013

The more I read

the graceless, shallow 'poetry'
that wins awards and prizes
and gets 'poets' established,
the happier I am
for not even trying
to be published.

'I was born, that day, near there,

in wartime, of ignorant people,'
wrote Sharon Olds, my close-contemporary.
But we are all ignorant
of who and what we are
and what we wreak
and what we will become;
and most knowledge
(like my own sententia)
even when irrefutable
is dementia.

Saturday 15 June 2013

Camus said (famously)

that there was only one
real philosophical question:
whether or not to waste one's time
staying alive - which leads to the other
philosophical question:
If it is painful, why bother ?


Having not only decided to live painfully, but also to breed
(which makes a grotesque mockery of the philosophical question),
he also wrote (Notebooks, 1951-1959) :

'Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, 
stare blankly at ceilings, beat your head against walls, 
refuse to see  people, paint...write. 
Get scared some more. 
Allow your little mind to do nothing but consider. 
Stay inside...go out...whatever you do; stay scared as hell. 
You will never be able to experience everything. 
So, please, give your soul poetic justice and simply 
experience yourself.'

Speaking Eurocentrically,

in the bad old days
empires and civilisations spread
from East to West.
That trend has not ceased,
but in the bad new days
social evils and brain-breakdown
move from West to East.

Karl and I

have invented a new word
in two forms:

ARSEHOLISTIC (Insular)

ASSHOLISTIC (American).

We hope it will gain currency
from the Isles of Scilly
to the Barents Sea.

Friday 14 June 2013

It is not surprising

that the me-me generation
(to which I belong)
should have invented
the meme of meme -
an evolving but lifeless genus.

Since writing the above,
my old friend Dennis
introduced me to the word
enthymeme,
'an informally stated syllogism
with an implied premise.'

In the semi-demi-united Kingdom

the greatest threat
to liberality and truthfulness
is neither Government nor Big Business -
but the hypocritical, hysterical,
bullying gutter-press.

There are two exceptional and good things about England

in contrast to the innumerable bad ones.

1. The British Broadcasting Corporation.

2. There is no National Holiday
(depite the upstart national saint's day coinciding with Shakespeare's birthday).




Note for those few who are interested in such things:

England's patron saint was originally Edmund, King and Martyr...
nearly all of whose relics were taken from Bury St Edmund's to Toulouse in 1217, during the Anglo-Norman & Northern French land-grab and genocide in Occitania (SW France) known as the Albigensian Crusade.

St George (the personal patron and intercessor of the rascal Richard I) was introduced as England's national saint at the same time, 
but St Edmund didn't disappear from English awareness until the 14th century.

Wednesday 12 June 2013

An adaptation of a famous 1937 poem by John Betjeman

which could have me sent to Guantanamo Bay.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Queens!
It's full of snooty human bein's,
All in thrall to vile machines.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
That suburb of designer-jeans
And folk who sneer at processed beans,
But have canned minds, canned breath....


(The New York semi-suburb of Queens has Botanical Gardens, lakes,
an art-gallery, a golf-course and a 'neighborhood' called Utopia.)


Read the long original poem here.
 

Overcoming the misfortune of having an ego.

The best thing
to do with a self
is to laugh at it
and call it names -
such as shitwit, zombie or Tierra del Fuego.

I may have said this before :

there is no more-insulting farewell
than to be urged to take care.
What's wrong with the simple
Farewell, or
Have a great time, or,
best of all -
Don't have a care ?

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Collateral Damage

Whole eco-systems shatter...
Great and continual misery can come
from those who seek to
change things "for the better".

'Happiness'

is a meme or concept
invented by particularly
cruel marketeers.
Contentment, on the other hand
is a very pleasant
form of suffering
with little pain within the brain,
and not much weeping-without-tears.

Monday 10 June 2013

Experience

drifts in the ocean of input,
its bathysphere built out of
simulation, dissimulation,
dis- and mis-information.

Re-blogged

from OmegaOutlet.tumblr.com


“Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, 
and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.”
     —Claude Lévi-Strauss 

Sunday 9 June 2013

Prisons

are temples of revenge,
filled with human offerings
from the rich to the gods
of comfort, fear and property.

Routine

stupefies.

Distopia

will be updated hourly
- as long as there are internet
and electricity.
Until they stop
there will be no room for pity
(which needs no persuasion
or titillation,
and asks for nothing,
not even toleration)
in the ever more-crowded
tenement of human life -
but only for the meaner,
ever more-demanding
kinds of love.

Saturday 8 June 2013

The Secret of Desire :

a little goes
a long way.

OMG !

Is God's interjection
as He admires
His Divine erection.


The difference between myth and history:

myth can be altered at will
to have present relevance and meaning,
whereas history is bound
by the academic straitjacket
that eventually silences
all the 'social sciences'.

Friday 7 June 2013

Hate

is the only hero.
Alas, the cosmic tendency
to complexity  !

Mr Roberts

wrote his vast and wonderful
Shantaram 
( 'probably the best book I have ever read',
competing with Malone Dies and The Brothers Karamazov,
though some denounce it as self-aggrandising drivel)
three times: twice it was destroyed
after confiscation by extremistly uncivil
Authorities.

Of my hundreds of poems
I can recite just one.
Of my hundreds of blogs
I can remember none.
Quite apart from the courageous
will-power involved,
how did Mr Roberts manage
to recall the details that occupy
over nine hundred very well-paced
and well-written pages ?

The ignorance of the intelligent

is what they don't permit themselves
to ask.

Thursday 6 June 2013

Almost all you need to know about History.

Since the rise of European power
almost all science ((unlike philosophy
a pastime of the élite), therefore
almost all technology, has divided
humans more and more
into very rich and very poor,

and into Nation States, which,
having defined themselves by war,
now destructively cohere
by defending their very rich, their powerful
from the 'terrorism' that the poor
have always suffered and always will endure,
and by ever-greater surveillance
of their increasingly-separated citizens.

Technology has turned billions
of animals to suffering food-machines,
has chopped down most of the world's forests,
churned 'fertile' land to sterile monocultures
which end up barren from producing
cheap and tasteless food for processing
to keep the poor - and animals -
alive, but un-alert, productive.
Technology is as evil as
science is reductive.

Against Nature

From depilation
to genital mutilation,
'cosmetic surgery',
gang-rape, prostitution,
prozac, benzodiazepines -
women's bodies
have become crime-scenes.

Wednesday 5 June 2013

The love of evil

is the root of all money,
and evil is its route..

More men escape TO war

than from it.  And women-soldiers
are more likely to be raped like booty
by their 'fellow' servicemen
than injured 'in the line of duty'.

What is Government

but the power to be corrupted...
and if it can't control mere banks
how can we know
who controls its tanks ?

Marriage, Homes and Homos

for David




100 years ago the anglophone world considered 'homo-
sexuals' a greater 'threat to society'  than the homeless.

The grim bourgeoisie has accepted
and welcomed to its sterile bosom
the well-housed, greedily-consuming
homos - but (of course) not the harmless,
frugal, slightly-inconvenient homeless. 
I am ashamed not just to be human,
not just to be an intellectual mome,
but a human homo with a comfortable home.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

Particle Physics

Beyond banality
of evil
there is no such thing
as reality...

Terrorists do nasty things

for love of hate,
hot-blooded, testosteronal,
perhaps addictive.

Soldiers do nasty things
with testosteronal discipline,
cold-bloodedly, for money -
and varying measure of dutiful enjoyment.

Police and prison warders
are often less-disciplined than terrorists
and with less job-satisfaction.

Does this tell us anything
about the subtle connections
between love, hate, violence and employment ?

Interlude: Leafy Sea Dragon.


The near-invisibility of their fins gives these beautiful creatures 
the appearance of floating seaweed that is drifting with the current...

[read on]

Monday 3 June 2013

The Hypocrisy of Reason produces Monsters.

The man who wrote
COGITO, ERGO SUM
deserved to have a statue
of the Virgin
stuck up his bum.

Forbidden Ritual

It seems to me a Primordial
and profoundly religious Act
to eat the heart of your enemy -
or indeed your best friend.
Why do you who so thoughtlessly
eat the horrible
terror-tissue of exhausted animals
trundled in their thousands and penned
at an abattoir near you think the deed,
the ceremony so terrible ?
Maybe to accept it you also need
statues, mihrab or a thurible.

The thoughtless think that such gew-gaws
are necessary - alongwith
education, armies, property and fences,
locks and keys, elections, leaders,
heterosexual monogamy,
endurance, employment,
eating meat, and being breeders...

Sunday 2 June 2013

'Humanity'

is not just the most two-faced
but the dirtiest word.
One is less debased
by discussion of a turd.

'Whenever anyone mentions Alexandria'

- a version by Anthony Weir of
Mikhail Alexeyevich Kuzmin's
famous poem -


is the




Page of the Month
for June.

Saturday 1 June 2013

Funny Pornography

There is very little good
(I mean well-conceived, well-photographed,
thoughtful, humorous, tender or absurd) pornography
amongst all the pictures and videos
uploaded by psychotic/compulsive/addictive drecks,
that populate the Web.
Funny pornography
is almost a contradiction in terms -
so boringly-seriously-stupid
and often horrible
are so many men's attitudes to 'sex'.

Stressed

people eat
stressed meat
stripped efficiently
from stressed animals.
Isn't civilisation
sweet ?

(Especially for the élite.)