The Wizard of Venus

Here's a bit which appeared in The Wizard of Venus that really resonated with the whole Michael Cohen's testimony before the House Oversight Committee for me:


THE WIZARD OF VENUS: "Now you are zaldars 1, aren't you?"

CARSON OF VENUS: "No," I said, "but you are a jackass."

THE WIZARD OF VENUS: "What is a jackass?" he demanded.

CARSON OF VENUS: "You," I told him.

THE WIZARD OF VENUS: "I suppose a jackass is a great person in your country," he said.

CARSON OF VENUS: "Many of them are in high places," I assured him.



1  A zaldar is a small animal, kind of like a pig. The Wizard of Venus claims / believes that he has the power to turn people / Venusians into zaldars...and they seem to think so, too, even though he does not have this power. He does have hypnotic powers which successfully convince them that he has this power, though. Carson is able to resist The Wizard because of his mystical training in India...the same training which allows him to communicate his adventures back to "Edgar Rice Burroughs" on Earth.

Just one more thing....

I was taking a break from the Michael Cohen testimony, doing some dishes, when something hit me. One of the congresspeople had asked Cohen about a purported video of Trump striking Melania while they were in an elevator. Cohen immediately responded by saying something along the lines (I'm working from memory) of, "Mr. Trump would never do that."

What hit me was when I imagined the roles of Trump and Cohen being reversed. If there was a report of a video of Cohen striking his wife in an elevator and someone asked Trump about it, even if Trump knew 100% that it was a lie, I can hear him saying, "Many people say that that is true. I don't know, but I don't see why it wouldn't be true."

Cohen is a bad man. He is a criminal. No doubt about that. He most certainly does deserve to go to jail. But next to Donald Trump he looks like a fuckin' saint.

Well shit, no saint emoji. 

Michael Cohen Testimony

I've been watching it from the start...though not always with great attention, I'll admit...but several thoughts occur to me as we come to the first break:



One:

Brother K‏ @BrotherK19

2 thoughts on Rep. #JimJordan (@Jim_Jordan): (1) he really shouldn't snort four lines of coke before going into a committee meeting & (2) when I went into the kitchen for a minute and heard his voice, I thought he was an angry little girl. #CohenTestimony #HouseOversightCommittee

9:06 AM - 27 Feb 2019

Two:

Brother K‏ @BrotherK19

"Everybody's job at the #Trump organization was to protect Mr. Trump." #MichaelCohen testimony

9:11 AM - 27 Feb 2019

Three: 

Man, these Republicans are total ASSholes. I mean, I know Cohen is a dirty boy, but he looks like a fuckin' angel compared to these lunatics. 

The Wizard of Venus

Just read a little bit in The Wizard of Venus (by Edgar Rice Burroughs) that I found particularly funny:

     The room was very quiet, there was not a sound, when suddenly he shouted, "Silence! I cannot endure this infernal noise. Chop off their heads! Chop off their heads! Then, perhaps, I shall have peace."
     This was the first outward demonstration of his insanity that we had witnessed; though his appearance had immediately convinced me that he was a congenital maniac. The only reaction to his outburst was a babble of voices and stamping of feet.
     "That is better," he shouted above the din; "now I can sleep. Put their heads back on again."

ERB is a pretty funny guy, but I don't remember him every going into Weird territory in this way. I like that in a man.

I have really enjoyed these Venus (Amtor) books a lot. When I finish this one (which was only a 49 page story, and I'm halfway through even as we speak) I've only got half of Carson of Venus (which I'm reading with Joe) and then Escape on Venus. And then that's it. SAD!  😞 1



But surely those The Wild Adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs Series folks will get around to Carson eventually, right?


1  I either write or work on a blog entry pretty much every day, so I'm pretty sure that this is the first time that blogger.com has given me an option to insert emojis. Kind of exciting, don't you think?

👮👯💦🙏🙊🙌😇😈💣

Oh HELLS yeah. This changes EVERYthing. 2

2   Just shitting you there. But it is kind of fun, I think.

Providence

I don't watch a lot of college basketball, but when I saw a listing for Providence vs Butler, of course I had to tune in. I mean, who wouldn't want to watch the Cthulhus beat down a bunch of Bulldog bitches, right?

Well, imagine my surprise when I tuned in and not only found no Cthulhus...but not even a bunch of Lovecrafts, for fuck's sake. Shit, man, I thought that people from Rhode Island were cool. I mean, they had the balls to call their 3/4ths landlocked state an island. You'd think they could put themselves out there just a little bit in naming their basketball team.

So that's it for me, Big P. I'm droppin' the mic, and next time I see your name in the listings I'm just going to walk on by. I'm going to spend that viewing time on the Las Vegas Whores next time.

But not ha ha funny.

It's funny, but not ha ha funny. My mom used that line a lot.

I was just saying my nightly prayers... yep, that has become a thing for me. It makes me feel better. It gives me a moment of clarity at the end of the day.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but there it is. 

I do it first thing in the morning, too.

It always goes something like this:

Thank you for Jimmy, Jacqueline,  and Joe. They are the greatest blessings I've found in this life. Please protect them, comfort them when they need it, and imbue them with a sense of Your presence. Let them always know that they are important, that what they do has significance,  and that they are loved. Let them know that they can always talk to me, that even if I've died I will lean in close to hear them, and that if I can't answer them, I will touch their arm gently so that they know they are never alone.

I usually cry a little bit when I run those words through my head.

And then I give thanks for some other stuff...friends and house and the other things that make for a reasonably comfortable life.

Tonight after I did the prayer I started thinking about my mom. I started missing her really badly. I loved her, of course. But I also really liked her. She was weird and funny and smart, and we used to talk and talk and talk. But as I was thinking about her, I wished that we had talked more. And then it occurred to me that I've actually spent a lot of my life focusing on things that really weren't worth the attention. Of course, I didn't know I was squandering my time at the time...but in retrospect it's painfully clear.

It's like a heart attack. Once you have one, you look back and you think, Well, fuck...how did I not see THAT one coming.

Anybody else thinking of Denis Leary's Lou Gherig joke?

Yeah.

It's funny.

A Close Encounter of the Burroughs Kind

Sorry to admit it, but I'm pretty shy about starting up conversations with people I don't know. But when I spotted Franz Kafka's The Castle in the basket of the old guy (heh heh...as if I'm not) in Half-Price Books this morning, I couldn't stop myself from asking, "Are you a Franz Kafka fan?" He seemed a little baffled by the question initially, but then said not so much that, but he was a book collector. And we chatted about that for a moment, and then I pointed out that there was a 1920 copy of Thuvia, Maid of Mars for a couple of bucks (somebody had bought the Pirates of Venus) *  if he was interested in that, and he said he wasn't because he already had all of Edgar Rice Burroughs's books (including all of the Tarzan books in hardcovers)...and had read all of them, too. My brother! It was a nice little moment, for sure. We chatted a bit longer, but I didn't want to wear out my welcome, so I left him to it and am hoping I'll run into him again sometime. These little moments of unexpected pleasure in making contact with another person--such is the stuff lives are made on. It's the antidote to measuring out  your life with coffee spoons. 

Yep

"The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.” 

 William Goldman

Hard to believe that this isn't someone writing about the United States of America, 2019.

"The proceeding evidence, collected from sources of unquestioned credibility, proves the force of those great physical laws, which, in the most flourishing countries out of Europe, encouraged the accumulation of wealth, but prevent its dispersion; and thus secured to the upper classes a monopoly of one of the most important elements of social and political power. The result was, that in all those civilizations the great body of the people derived no benefit from the national improvements; hence, the basis of the progress being very narrow, the progress itself was very insecure. When, therefore, unfavorable circumstances arose from without, it was but natural that the whole system should fall to the ground. In such countries, society, being divided against itself, was unable to stand. And there can be no doubt that long before the crisis of their actual destruction, these one-sided and irregular civilizations had begun to decay; so that their own degeneracy aided the progress of foreign invaders, and secured the overthrow of those ancient kingdoms, which, under a sounder system, might have been easily saved."

History of Civilization in England

Volume I

by

Henry Thomas Buckle

published in 1856 1 

1  18fuckin'56...can you believe that?

After

I can't tell you how good it feels

Not to piss into a jug

Or feel plastic nozzles in my nostrils

Or feel the needle embedded in my forearm

Or hear the chirp of the monitor every time I move

Or the shriek of the alarm when I shift my weight in the bed

Or to wake up every two hours to have my blood pressure taken

Or....

But now at home and alone I pause

And listen to my heart

How we doing?

Tucker v. Rutger

Liar

#JussieSmollett is in trouble b/c it looks like he staged an attack on h/self. Meanwhile, #Trump has been saying the #MuellerProbe is a #WitchHunt and that brown people r invading the USA...lying about how he, his family, and the country are being attacked. Is he in trouble yet?

99 and 85 Year Old ERBs

Thuvia, Maid of Mars 

Grosset & Dunlap

 Pirates of Venus

Grosset & Dunlap

Both of these lovelies had been beaten to within an inch of their lives, but it was still a thrill to see this octogenarian and that nonagenarian (just a hair shy of a centenarian) on the shelf at Half-Price Books today. They were cheap, too...$5 for one and $6 for the other...but I resisted the temptation since (1) I've already read both of them and (2) they were in such bad shape. Doesn't mean I didn't want them, though. You know how it is.

Good thing that the US of A is nothing like this.

I just read a bit in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England Volume I (1856) which was so poignant and apropos for NOW that I had to break it out of my regular Buckle column to put it up here:

"We find the upper classes enormously rich, and the lower classes miserably poor. We find those by whose labour the wealth is created, receiving the smallest possible share of it; the remainder being absorbed by the higher ranks in the form either of rent or of profit. And as wealth is, after intellect, the most permanent source of power, it has naturally happened that a great inequality of wealth has been accompanied by a corresponding inequality of social and political power. It is not, therefore, surprising that from the earliest to which our knowledge of India extends, an immense majority of the people, pinched by the most galling poverty, and just living from hand-to-mouth, should always have remained in a state of stupid debasement, broken by incessant misfortune, crouching before their superiors in abject submission, and only fit either to be slaves themselves or to be led to battle to make slaves of others."

I mean...Holy Shit! Is that the whole enchilada or what? Here's a little something something from Wikipedia to put it into perspective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States

Gee...I wonder why (1) socialism is such a dirty word in America and (2) so many of the progressive democratic candidates for the 2020 Presidential Campaign are espousing policies which are socialistic. Must be something in the water.

E Reason B

"...most of us reason [...] not by what might be possible; but by what has fallen within the range of our experience."

Out of Time's Abyss 

by 

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Not that this is particularly mind-blowing in terms of the idea it expresses, but there are several things I find interesting about this line...not least of which is that it appears in an action / adventure novel first published in 1918. But beyond that: (1) how this is essentially an indictment of Reason as it exists in the realm of the real word; if Reason does not explore that which is possible, then it is not really Reason, is it? It's kind of the inverse of the famous Arthur Conan Doyle / Sherlock Holmes line, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." This is one of the problems I encounter repeatedly in terms of my explorations of politics and religion: most of the people I speak to are not willing to explore the realm of the possible, because they've already decided (presumptuously) that their immediate experience dictates where that line of demarcation lies. (2) When ERB uses the phrase "what has fallen within the range of our experience," I find the word "fallen" to be particularly interesting. Fallen implies "by chance," which just really highlights the absolute silliness of allowing your own immediate experience to be the cage for your beliefs. Your immediate experience is mere accident...even if you try to enforce a design. Sure, there are things you can do to expand your realm, but even there, chance is going to be involved. Think about the music you love, for instance. Well, since I don't know you that well, I'll think about the music that I love. I love a lot of music. In all kinds of genres. But of late I've been particularly taken by "Beatus Vir" by Claudio Monteverdi (1567 - 1643). I have listened to it a dozen times per week or more for the past several months...and hear I often hear it in my head when it's not playing. (This is in large part due to the fact that Jacqueline has taken a shine to the song, so every time we get in the car together she dials it up on the thumb drive.) It is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard...and I never grow tired of it. But I'd never heard of it...and never listened to Monteverdi...before I attended a lecture on the opera Enemies: A Love Story, wherein the orchestra conductor, David Stern, happened to throw in a random comment (completely unrelated to the opera) that he wished people still listened to Monteverdi. If he hadn't happened to have said that...and if I hadn't happened to have really liked him...and if I hadn't written myself a note so that I would remember to look up Monteverdi...and if the library hadn't happened to have four discs of Monteverdi's sacred music...and if I hadn't happened to have listened to the first disc in its entirety...and possibly even if Jacqueline hadn't immediately decided that she liked that song, because it was her focus on it that brought it to my attention...well, then I probably wouldn't think that "Beatus Vir" is one of the greatest songs in the history of music. Which leads me to wonder...what else is out there? Come to think of it, maybe that's what drives my seemingly insatiable thirst for words and sounds and images...the fear (for lack of a better word, though that's not really the best word) that I'm missing something really really REALLY great. And I guess that's why, at least in part, I feel compelled to write about stuff...to try to get what I consider the great stuff to some other folks. (Hi.)

Also, though it has nothing to do with the words I've quoted here, (3) the cover artwork for this novel...at least in this edition...looks a whole lot like the work of the great Neal Adams to me...not just the linework, but the attitude of the characters and the way they are placed in the drawing as well. But it's not Neal, it's the most awesome and excellent Roy Gerald Krenkel. Roy did more than a few covers for ERB books...Tanar of Pellucidar, Land of Terror, The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, Back to the Stone Age, The Land of Hidden Men, some Tarzan books.... Lots of really good work. My favorite thing about the drawing for Out of Time's Abyss is that if you look closely, you can see that on the hip of the loincloth wearing "savage" man is a pistol in a holster. That's good times, ennit?

On a sad note...this is the final book of the Caspak trilogy, and it's pretty short, so I'll be finished with it very soon, probably by the end of the day. And then...well, Joe and I are about halfway through Carson of Venus, and then we have Escape on Venus and

The Wizard of Venus, and that's it, no more new Edgar Rice Burroughs books for me. Unless somebody gets around to releasing some of the unpublished and under published / never collected in book form non-fiction he wrote. (Nudge nudge. Aren't there any millionaires out there who love ERB? Step up, people!) Speaking of which, based upon my reading of three Burroughs biographies, it's obvious that there is one hell of a lot of that non-fiction. Enough to fill several big fat volumes. I guess it's a real measure of the lack of respect the literary world feels for ERB that it hasn't been collected, isn't it? A guy who has sold millions and millions of books, and who has created at least one character who is amongst the most recognized fictional creations of all time.

Sigh.

Opera Girl

Took my two younger kids--both autistic--to the last show of the season for Kentucky Opera. All three of us have been subscribers for the past several years, and both of them look forward to going, and always enjoy the shows. 

Today's offering was Rigoletto. For some reason I had conflated it with Pagliacci. Don't know why: the latter is about a killer clown, and the former is about a clown who hires a killer. Clear distinction. ANYway, I enjoyed it all immensely, but I was (mistakenly) looking forward to the "Vesti La Giubba" aria, and was really leaning into the music waiting to catch my first whiff of it. I waited. And waited. And then, early in Act III, the orchestra hit a note, there was a little pause, and then they hit another note. Neither note was particularly distinctive, and I didn't think anything of it until Jacqueline tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I know this song!" My first thought was, "Sure you do." And then a few seconds later "La Donna è Mobile" began. Not as famous as "Vesti La Giubba," I suppose, but familiar to me.

Apparently not as familiar to me as to Jacqueline, though.

That girl KNOWS her opera.

They say that cat Trump is a bad mother-- Shut your mouth!

I'm just talking about Buckle.

Were those the days or what?

And furthermore...

Which just sounds scathingly naive,  doesn't it?

And how sad is THAT?

She's a Black HalloWEEN Cat

Jacqueline likes to ask me questions that she already knows--or "knows"--the answer to. So when she asks me, "What kind of cat is Jet?" (who, yes, is black, and who is named after the Paul McCartney song), if I say something like, "She's a Kitty Cat Cat!" (since I know nothing about kinds of cats) she will act aggravated with me and hiss, "No, she a black halloWEEN cat!" After she'd done this bit a few times, the phrase stuck in my head, and, like a lot of phrases, it turned itself into a piece of a song. Unlike most other phrases that turn into pieces of songs in my head, though, it turned into a trumpet song.

I play a little bit of guitar (specializing in the Em, A, C, D, and G chords, with occasional forays into E, F, and Am territory), can tap a tambourine with some facility, and have been known to play "Go To Dark Gethsemane" on a recorder, but that is pretty much the length, breadth, and depth of my musical ability. So I did what any 21st Century Man would do...I opened up GarageBand and messed around with the Trumpet sounds. And it was okay. But it didn't sound like the sound I heard in my head.

So I went to Mel Owen Music on Shelbyville Road and asked if I could rent a trumpet. The answer was Yes, and the price was reasonable...but there was one catch: in order to rent an instrument, you had to take lessons. I wasn't particularly averse to that, so I signed up. It didn't take long before I discovered that the lessons weren't taking me where I wanted to go, though, so after a few of them I quit, returned the trumpet, did some research, took a deep breath...and on August 3, 2017 I went onto Amazon and ordered a LJ Hutchen Bb Trumpet with Plush-Lined Case for $249.99. Which is pretty cheap for a trumpet. But it was Good Enough For Me. And I started trying to write my first trumpet song, "She's a Black Halloween Cat." I got the central riff down pretty quickly, but since that only lasted for 8.18 seconds, I obviously needed to do a little something something with it. So I repeated it, of course. 16.36 seconds down...maybe another 3 minutes to go, right? Piece of cake. As I played around with the riff and saw where it wanted to go, though, variations on the sound began to occur to me. And in some cases they were a lot easier to work with, so I started to write other songs. The first one I finished I called "Hey Aha"...because after I finished recording it I thought it needed some kind of vocal effect, and when I sat down to do it I found myself chanting, "Hey aha!" over and over again...and I thought it worked pretty well, so what was meant to be a scratch vocal ended up being the vocal vocal. Then I started working on another offshoot song which was kind of long and involved, but there was one section of it that begged for More Trumpet, so I recorded that piece separately...and layered something like five Really Me Playing The Trumpet trumpets into it...and ended up with "Alone For Two Minutes." Which was, as you would probably have guessed, two minutes long. That one went through several permutations, and I began to discover that some of the permutations actually were different songs...or maybe more like different movements in a symphonic composition if that doesn't sound too pretentious. So that song in the longer version became "Alone," which had very little trumpet but a pretty killer (imho) bass line. I was still trying to get "She's a Black Halloween Cat" down, but then weird shit started happening in my head. Little snatches of trumpet which I then incorporated into some outré rhythmic settings. Like "Ki'Dee Caut," named after the way that Jacqueline says Mickey Mouse pronounces "Kitty Cat." (As you can tell, Jacqueline's fingerprints are all over this project.) Other pieces came into being, and I began to realize that I was writing an album. 

And yesterday I finished it. I think. I'm still hearing some things in my head that didn't make it onto the recordings, but sometimes you just have to say enough is enough, y'know? So I thought I would share it with anybody who wants to share it. And thanks to SoundCloud, I am able to do that.

Here ya go.

MSNBC needs a Proofreader, and I Could Use a Job

?

Though I have to say that "The wall is very, very on its way" is one of my favorite Dumb Fuck sentences EVer.

You just couldn't make this shit up, y'know?