January 17, 2004
Lock the Fucking Door
This is the last weekend I have to finalize the
text of the book. Therefore, this will be conspicuously
short, as I am shutting the door, locking it,
unloading a crate of Appleton's and coke and facing
off for one final 48 hour round of introspection
and edited self-loathing.
Exciting Canadian politics news. A new conservative
candidate has announced
her intention to run for the head of the new
chimera right-wing Canuck party. And she's hot.
This is what Canadian politics needs - a sexy,
37-year old, multimillionaire woman CEO opposition
leader to balance out our decidely unsexy PM.
I heard she's twice divorced, a mother of two,
and has a hidden lust for graphomaniac drunken
poets with off-kilter staggers and a fondness
for pouring wine over their heads in the middle
of six hour bouts of intimacy. Like all other
women, I suppose.
Still haven't heard anything else from the Accountant.
Despite calls to murder him in cold blood in order
to boost sales of the book this September, I don't
know how much I would enjoy my new-found fame
and fortune while eating prison pillow. Thanks
for the advice, though. I'll let you know how
it all progresses.
January 15, 2004
Pre-emptive Announcement: Tourette's Tournament
of Evil
The Grand Idiots at Nunt.com are always looking
for ways to increase their reader's pleasure and
sense of well-being. They are also looking for
ways to inseminate horses. Which is why we are
trying out a new feature: The Daily Mingus Comment
System, as manufactured by the fine folks at Haloscan.
If it works out well, we may even upgrade and
add some colour and other exciting things. Let
us know if you like it. We think it's fucking
great. Community: here we come.
In other news, the ThinkTank at Zygote
has branded one of our first contests for the
upcoming year. In the tradition of George W. and
the invasion of Iraq, we are discussing the event
well in advance of its execution. The rules and
regulations are a little foggy at this point (until
we copy paste them from a real site), but the
general idea will be this:
Tourette's Tournament of Evil
1] Contestants must read a selected Nunto from
Mingus Tourette's upcoming book of prose-styled
poems, Nunt.
2] Contestants will create a piece of interpretive
digital artwork based on the Nunto. The artwork
will fit in a standard wall-paper format, ie.
1024 * 768 pixels.
3] Contestants submit the artwork for judgement.
Judgement will occur with extreme prejudice.
4] The winner will be announced. The winner will
be awarded ... THE TOURETTE TOURNAMENT OF EVIL
GAS MASK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5] [Optional] Drunk on their own street credit,
their own fleeting glory, and a shot of absinthe
from Mingus' bellybutton, the winner will be carried
through the streets of Balthazar on the back of
a thousand slaves to a waiting room filled with
virgins to be annointed with oil and set alight
on Viking funeral barges.
Bonus] Sweaty Charles hand-delivers a signed portrait
of Mingus Tourette in his fashionable 'Yankee
DiaperWare'. Yeah!!! Now try clicking that comment
button, right now, because this is a whole different
system. Try it!! Now!!! This is new!!!
January 14, 2004
Spin, Counterspin
The White House is pointing messy fingers at Paul
O'Neill about secret
documents that he may have taken with him for
his appearance on CBS, or given to the writer, Suskind.
During the writing of Suskind's new book, The
Price of Loyalty, O'Neill handed over 19, 000
pages to a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist. Maybe
a few of them weren't declassified. So what. Both
men are responsible Americans who can probably handle
having a few secret documents in their possession.
Hell, O'Neill has been reading secret documents
since he worked for Richard Fucking Nixon.
How does this minor clerical error compare in any
fashion to the main issue that O'Neill has raised?
It doesn't - this publicity counterattack is the
White House attempting to deflect major damage with
as much counterspin as it can possibly muster. The
administration would love to sink the idea that
Bush started planning to invade Iraq well before
9/11, and took advantage of a nation's grief to
do so. They would like to avoid any mention that
the war has killed a lot of civilians, and of course,
almost 500 Americans.
I recently found a sobering section of the WashingtonPost.com
entitled 'Faces of the Fallen'. It chilled me, just
a bit. I'm a vociferous opponent of the American
invasion of Iraq, but I would never put the blame
on the soldiers. Mostly, I feel sorry for them because
they are fighting a war for the old Texas agendas
of Cheney and Bush, and so many of them have been
killed. Thousands more have been badly wounded,
and all of those soldiers have left somebody behind
to mourn them.
Yet the White House would now like you to think
that Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's possession
of a few classified documents is more important
than these 500
men and women.
What else can I say? Take a look, click on a few
faces, and if you've got the stomach for it, read
a few of those people's last letters. And then try,
very hard, to ignore the Washington Spin, and focus
on whatever it is that might pass for truth these
days in a rotten America.
Comments...
January 13, 2004
The EndGame Approaches
Spent the weekend in exile. Considered switching
the order of everything, drank four shots of rum
and decided these poor fucking poems should be left
in the same order they've been in for the last year.
At the point when I made the decision, I came to
realize that the poems would be lonely without each
other, that the poems in Book Four would be miserable
if I moved one of their cohorts to the distant Book
One. I don't know if they would get along, frankly.
I mean, it's easy to move them around on the floor,
each of their names on separate cue cards, and wonder
if they would be better suited elsewhere, but I've
come to accept that these poems probably love each
other like brothers and sisters, that some of them
are lovers, that some are obsessed with the poems
six down the row, that some feel the need to possess
each other, and to be possessed. They stare down
the row, into another book, and say those words.
Possess me. We are going to be held together and
judged together and who loves me will not necessarily
love you, but we are all in this together, into
the breach soon enough.
The way I talk to these poems reminds me of the
time I worked in a sawmill and I named the lumber
bins, the high pillars of steel with hooks to catch
dropping wood. There were forty of them, and I spent
ten hours at a time with them, and talked to them,
and laughed at their foibles, alone.
We would talk late into the night and I would tell
them of women that kept me alive in the dark, of
the shivers that a touch could conjure, of the way
a woman's mouth could swallow one whole.
I would talk, these metal girders would listen,
and when I would tell someone else about this relationship,
people would shake their heads and I could see that
they could not understand. What can I say. I knew
them more intimately than anyone else. They knew
my hands, and I knew their strength and we shared
many long nights together. Those bins were my friends,
like these poems are now. Some of them I love the
way I love women, some I love like old drinking
friends, some make me laugh with the one joke they
always have at the ready. They are one, they are
part of the greater poem, they are but lines themselves,
and now, after this much time, I am one of them.
I am naught but a poem. I am words on a screen.
I am but a line myself, swirling in the current
of too many thoughts, too much of that woman, too
much time spent in exile.
January 12,
2004
What? Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq Before 9/11?
Say it ain't so, Paul.
Former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill has spoken
out for a new book written by Pulitzer prizewinning
journalist Ron Suskind. It is entitled The
Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House
and the Education of Paul O'Neill.
In this book, O'Neill asserts that George Bush began
discussing the invasion of Iraq from the moment
he took office, nearly a year before the 9/11 tragedy.
O'Neill portrays Cheney as an unstoppable force,
and Bush as a man who knew little, asked few questions
and gave minimal orders. O'Neill says that in his
23 months in the Treasury Secretary position, he
saw no evidence of WMD in any capacity.
If any of these stories are correct, and there is
little reason to suspect that they are not, it means
that Cheney is running the show, Bush is as stupid
as he appears, and the current administration is
a behemoth of a political opportunist that used
the death of 3000 Americans on a September morning
as a justification to invade a country that had
nothing to do with it.
Learn more by reading articles in Time,
The
Chicago Sun-Times, or the
International Herald Tribune. Or buy the book.
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January 12 - January 18, 2004