Re: a comment on Gothic by zodiac	3-May-04/6:44 PM
Perhaps you've seen my medium-length piece, "The Gold Buggerer"?
Re: As Catullus Said (Updated and Revised) by Sasha	3-May-04/5:24 PM
I would translate "praecipitem eiciunt" as "subjected him to anal abuses" for the rhyme.
Re: a comment on Gothic by zodiac	3-May-04/5:17 PM
Sorry. My solution: I'll try not to post more bum crap.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/4:42 PM
Hey, what an ass you are!
Re: a comment on Gothic by zodiac	3-May-04/2:38 PM
I think it's a bum cadence, and worse, it doesn't make any damn sense. I got the thing about the fear of a dead mother while delirious a few months ago with the superflu and posted it because it's right next to JBH's about a poet hanging himself and because it somehow appeals to me as a Southerner, despite myself. I suppose on the most straightforward level, the mother is the betrayed motherland, which is how we actually think of it down here. Yes, we are a sick, sad people. Haven't you ever read any O'Connor? She's my thesis, by the way. And that, too, strikes me as faintly sad and absurd right now. The clay is on his Oxfords from his youth in the South. The mother's not really dead. Oxford is, incidentally, the Mississippi hometown of Faulkner.
Re: Natural Remedy by richa	3-May-04/1:12 PM
Good. The first bit appeals to me most, my mother-in-law being the craziest homeopath in an area chock full of crazy homeopaths. Not being much of a gardener myself, I don't get a lot from the rest. Kind of a Seamus Heaney feel, I guess, only miniaturized - a teaspoonful of dirt turned. "Grow mature and tall" bugs me a little. I don't know if that's gardener talk or not, but it seems one of those adjectives should be replaced with a better one - doesn't matter which. Good as ever.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/11:06 AM
Oh God...
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/7:45 AM
Furthermore, it seems to me that something can only rightly be called unverifiable if an infinite number of tests to verify it have failed. To say something is unverifiable without first trying to verify it a lot is ludicrous. Therefore, verifiability must precede unverifiability, especially since verifiability only rightly means the extent to which something (anything) CAN be proven or disproven.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/7:39 AM
MISGUIDED RESPONSE #1: Doesn't being "special" mean primacy in the context where it's special, such as theories of existence? M.R. #2: Or take it the other way: 'Unverifiability is what makes religion special' - true, but now 'special' has the sense of the drooling boy who peed every day on the bus. For 'unverifiability' to be what makes religion 'special' in a positive sense, then unverifiability has to be special in a positive sense. Ergo, unverifiability is positive, which leads to all kinds of silliness. It's simply better for verifiability to remain positive and unverifiability to be slightly negative.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/7:28 AM
What preposterous nonsense. All inanimate objects have haloes of smell, heat, and bacteria; if the device only measured these, it still wouldn't have returned a zero reading on the objects. If Negro farts are composed of something more than heat, bacteria, and smell, what is it? Soul, perhaps? What's more, Dr Carawax has in several other instances been publicly outed as a giant fraud and a gay, his only invention of any merit being the now sorely deficient MEDIOCRITY CHECKLISTE. The idea of a man like Carawax measuring soul is absurd. What's even more, the term "soul" didn't even exist until it was invented by Negroes in the 1960s, before which time everyone thought their physical bodies really were exhumed by Jesu on Judgment Day. This, of course, led to all kinds of supremely misguided attempts to preserve bodies after death, such as wrapping them in tinfoil and baking at a low temperature for an incredibly long time, which only had the effect of turning Walt Disney into a kind of flavorless jerky now marketed in EuroDisney as "American Space Meat." In short, you fail.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	3-May-04/3:37 AM
There is a point, and that point is verifiability, not current verification, which is what the other -=D_A=- has been saying for days now. Though I do think 113 made a mistake not allowing for the possibility that some kind of machine in the future (like 163's) will be able to detect and measure 'soul'. If that happens, I'm afraid we're all bound to find ourselves terminally humiliated by the Negroes once again, having still not recovered fully from that whole 'donkey cock' debacle.
Re: a comment on The Brigadier's Motto by wFraser Allonby Q.C.w	2-May-04/5:29 PM
"...Even as I hastily scrawl this note in my pantry, I can hear Lord Castlehaven at the top of the back stair. 'I say, Rawlins, come here!' he calls brightly - and again, his voice betraying only the slightest quiver. I must not appear too quickly. Master would hate to learn how keenly I look forward to these 'discussions of domestic matters' in the library..." - Diary of an English Butler (1630)
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	2-May-04/5:12 PM
1. Philosophy doesn't affect me, except for the possibility of being harmed by someone who has a philosophy which allows for such things. 2. A figure of speech, and redundant. 3. I mistyped. It's Zeno, of course. 4. I have a wife.
Re: a comment on The Brigadier's Motto by wFraser Allonby Q.C.w	2-May-04/4:56 PM
Buggering is strictly disciplinary, then?
Re: The Brigadier's Motto by wFraser Allonby Q.C.w	2-May-04/3:43 PM
"...Nor was the sixteenth-century sodomite a homosexual. In 1631, Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, was tried and executed for sodomy. It is clear from the proceedings that the earl was not understood by himself or anyone else to be a particular kind of sexual individual. ... The earl did not slip into his tightest doublet and waltz down to the nearest gay tavern to mingle with his fellow sodomists. He stayed in the manor house and buggered his servants. Gay self-awareness, gay pubs, the sense of group commonality, and even the term homosexual were not part of the earl's universe." - Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	2-May-04/11:38 AM
The assumption that I'm in some kind of tizzy over this discussion, leading me to fling "personal insults" heedlessly in any direction, is utterly preposterous. If I have 'personally insulted' you (by which you must mean "you are as foolish as you seem" from two comments ago) it's because I like personal insults of that sort and use them on everyone. Concerning your point 1., you're right. I was on my way to delete that comment when I saw yours. As far as your point 2., what supreme stupidity. If you were to ask me (which you haven't) what I find simplistic and trite about your world-view, one of my first answers would be your idea that the alternative to your system of beliefs is some kind of (inevitably self-destructive) hedonism "based [solely] on the desires of the flesh." No, wait, you didn't say that; you just said that if you didn't have your system of beliefs, you'd choose hedonistic gluttony, which is doubly idiotic. You ask, "Why are you so caught up on mine?" Mostly because it's only slightly less boring than the Irigaray I'm supposed to be reading. You ask, "What is it that you believe in?" That ninety-nine percent of philosophical/religious discussions really have no more bearing on my life than a) I'm still young enough to find them mildly entertaining, and b) there's the very real possibility of my being beaten to death or otherwise horribly killed by some true believer in something or other, but not enough for me to waste my time worrying about. The possibility of an afterlife doesn't make me any more or less inclined to be generally nice to other people, nor does Xeno's paradox prevent me from suddenly drawing my wife down onto the couch for a quick midafternoon screw.
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	2-May-04/9:45 AM
Once again, you've got cause and effect ten different kinds of backwards. You've essentially said: 1. Christianity appeals to me because it teaches denial of worldly pleasure, which I think should be denied... 2. ...although if it were up to me I'd "create a religion based on the pursuit of worldly pleasure" - 3. which is why I need religion. I'd just bollocks it up otherwise (cf. "Shame" and "Joseph, Joseph" by Joe-joe)... 4. ...though the desire to deny oneself pleasure and live, I don't know, "purely" or something is the natural tendency of the human soul. 5. How do we know this? Because the religion I subscribe to says so. What a bunch of crap assumptions. Please in the future do not assume anything about MY human nature or soul or whatever, which despite ten years of Catholic school and the fact of my being raised in an essentially evangelical and puritanical country says nothing about the inherent evil of worldly pleasure. Joe-joe: Your system is crap too, Zodie. zodiac: No. Probably not. Joe-joe: [some random unrelated thing.]
Re: a comment on deviant conveniences by J.B. Manning	2-May-04/7:29 AM
Here, Joe-joe, I'll argue pleasure with you. This discussion is far enough down the rabbit-hole, anyway. "Foolish as I may seem at times, I would dare not weigh my self down with a self-concocted system of beliefs that is at odds with my flesh and blood desires." 1. See "Shame" by Joe-joe. 2. See the following line: "Oh how much nicer it would be to live the life of a hedonist, giving into my every desire without giving thought to the eternal fate of my soul. " Conclusions: You are as foolish as you seem.
Re: a comment on государства by Wobble McFly	1-May-04/10:23 PM
Yes but I can get laid whenever I want and your poetry is still boring. And choppy.
Re: a comment on Losing Control by DrinkYouAway	1-May-04/9:08 AM
Whatever. X = -X is by far the most frequently-occuring poemranker theme. Yours, while interesting, is hugely outnumbered and fails.