Round Two

I am sad to announce that Frieda did not work out. She contributed three posts. I invited her based on some poetry she had written and her jovial, confrontational, humor. She was dealt with harshly in the comment section, which I tend to believe she had something to do with. She e-mailed me requesting to be taken off of my Contributors section. I asked her if she would return again, someday after the election to write some things that were more poetic in nature. I have a feeling we haven't seen the last of Frieda, she may be lurking around the comment section as we speak.

However, I would like to announce a new addition to Coney Island. Gorss has accepted his blogger invite. As a warning to would be commenters, he is fiercely smart, well read, and exceptionally adept to rational dialog. He'll burn you if you're not careful. He will correct your grammar, correct your facts, stop your point dead in its tracks and then take you out for a beer. He's tough. We are truly honored to have his writing abilities here on Coney Island.

I agreed to have him write here under one condition, that he takes back everything he's written that disagreed with what I said and that he vote for Senator John Kerry in the coming election and that he buy more beer. I'm waiting to hear back from him...

Corta'zar, Genet, Oberst and Hamlet's Arrows.

Yes. This is a quote post. I know no one reads these because I rarely read others quote posts. But I've been reading through some of Conor Oberst's lyrics and I've been reading Frieda's poetry and I'm reading a Corta'zar book and I thought of a Rosenquist painting and I had to copy down this little excerpt. It's from Julio Corta'zar. I believe The Pickle (My Sister Site) and I agree to disagree about him. And now that I'm thinking about it I'll have to add this one from Jean Genet that would have blown your mind had you read this quote post.

"I will say," said Andres, "that most of the time I yield to a necessity-a tension that can only be released onto the page. It's what those who write out of abnegation call 'the mission,' based on the reasonable idea that every flexed bow contains an arrow, and that every arrow's mission is to fly off and hit someplace."

Here, I believe that Corta'zar subtly sparks Hamlet's famous soliloquy. (ie.Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?)"
It's a trick of Corta'zar's to be always saying exactly what he's doing. He continues further on the page...

"Well, it's subtle," said the chronicler, who was plagiarizing sentences from the Spanish version of The Three Musketeers. Poets, for instance, are extremely happy with their poems, despite the fact that it's considered elegant to assume the opposite. Poets know very well that their poems are the highest realization: and they most certainly savor the fact. Never believe any story about a poem written through tears; if there are any tears, they're dredged up-like those of actors. True tears, composed of sodium chloride, are wept for the sake of oneself-not to supply lyrical ink. Remember Saint Augustine when one of his friends died: I WASN'T WEEPING FOR HIM BUT FOR MYSELF FOR WHAT I'D LOST. That's why elegies are written much later, recreating the pain and being happy, the way we're happy when we listen to Isolde die or witness the fall of Hamlet."
"Prince of Denmark," said Stella.
"Of course the thing is subtle as you said," said Andres.

And for the rest of you non-quote reading readers, Jean Genet...

"I am forced to use words that are weighed down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with expressions that are trivial, empty, hollow and invisible."

And for some further non reading here's one by Colon Oberst the lead singer and founder of Bright Eyes. You can listen to some of it here while you read along. It's important. Like Tom Waits, his voice matches the lyrics in this fantastic unison that doesn't happen often enough in music.

"I have a friend, he is made mostly of pain. He wakes up, drives to work,
and then straight back home again. He once cut one of my nightmares out of paper.
I thought it was beautiful, I put it on a record cover.
And I tried to tell him he had a sense of color and composition so magnificent.
And he said "Thank you, please but your flattery is truly not becoming me.
Your eyes are poor. You are blind. You see, no beauty could have come from me.
I am a waste of breath, of space, of time."
I knew a woman, she was dignified and true. Her love for her man was one of her many virtues.
Until one day, she found out that he had lied and decided the rest of her life,
from that point on would be a lie. But she was grateful for everything that had happened.
And she was anxious for all that would come next. But then she wept.
What did you expect? In that big, old house with all those cars she kept.
"Oh!" and "such is life," she often said. With one day leading her to the next,
you get a little closer to your death, which was fine with her.
She never got upset and with all the days she may have left,
she would never clean another mess or fold his shirts or look her best.
She was free to waste away alone.
Last night, my brother he got drunk and drove. And this cop pulled him off to the side of the road.
And he said, "Officer! Officer! You have got the wrong man.
No, no, I'm a student of medicine, the son of a banker, you don't understand!"
The cop said, "No one got hurt, you should be thankful. And you carelessness,
it is something awful. And no, I can't just let you go. And though your father's name is known,
your decisions are yours alone. You are nothing but a stepping stone
on a path to debt, to loss, to shame."
The last few months I have been living with this couple.
Yeah, you know, the kind that buy everything in doubles. They fit together, like a puzzle.
I love their love and I am thankful that someone actually
receives the prize that was promised by all those fairy tales that drugged us.
And they still do me. I'm sick, lonely, no laurel tree, just green envy.
Will my number come up eventually? Like Love is some kind of lottery,
where you can scratch and see what is underneath. It's "Sorry",
just one cherry, "Play Again." Get lucky.
So I have been hanging out down by the train's depot. No, I don't ride.
I just sit and watch the people there. They remind me of wind up cars in motion.
The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions.
And I want to scream out that it is all nonsense.
And that their lives are one track, and can't they see how it is all pointless?
But then, my knees give under me. My head feels weak and
suddenly it is clear to see that it is not them but me, who has lost my self-identity.
As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry,
like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.
And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.
And everything I have is trite and cheap and a waste of paint, of tape, of time.
Sometimes I park my car down my the cathedral, where floodlights point up at the steeples.
Choir practice is filling up with people. I hear the sound escaping as an echo.
Sloping off the ceiling at an angle. When voices blend they sound like angels.
I hope there is still some room left in the middle.
But when I lift my voice up now to reach them. The range is too high, way up in heaven.
So I hold my tongue, forget the song, tie my shoe and start walking off.
And try to just keep moving on, with my broken heart and my absent God
and I have no faith but it is all I want, to be loved and believe in my soul."

All the HoolaBalloo

I know a good lot of people who are choosing to vote for President Bush because of his view on abortion. The issue is problematic enough and usually the conversation stops when said view is uttered. But I'm skeptical of everything Bush says, I think the whole world is, so I had to scrape up any evidence I could of how well Bush is doing on ending abortions. After Clinton the stage was set. The abortion rate in the US was at an all time low when Bush took office. They have done an amazing job at hiding the evidence, but if you look closely, the abortion rate has reversed itself. According to Glen Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, Bush's words are proving with many voters to be stronger than his actions.

In the decade before George W. Bush became president, the number of abortions in the United States fell from 1,610,000 to 1,330,000. That is a decline of 17.4% over the decade of the 1990s, an average decrease of 1.7% per year. (The data come from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, which gets them from the Guttmacher Institute.)

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

... In total numbers, 7,869 more abortions were performed in these sixteen states during George W. Bush's second year in office than previously. If this trend reflects our nation, 24,000 more abortions were performed during George W. Bush’s second year in office than the year before (or three years before in the first three states). Had the previous trends continued, 28,000 fewer abortions should have occurred each year of the Bush era.

I searched an searched and this article came up everywhere. I found nothing worthy of a vote for a Pro-Life voter. Perhaps his supporters just have faith in him, but I'm not sure for what. I'm sure that this is the topic that most one issue voters know most about so I'm expecting to see some good Bush supporting evidence, and maybe a place that has more thorough
statistics.