Covid Day Women #16 and #20 a nod (and a wink) to Dylan   by John Hawkins   Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re trying to be so lewd They’ll stone ya just a-like they said they would They’ll stone ya when you’re grabbing pussy moan Then they’ll stone ya when you’re down there all alone   But I would not feel so all alone Pencey, Pompey, pass the friggin bone   Well, they’ll stone ya for your Putin horsey porn They’ll stone ya coz you’re silver spoony born They’ll stone ya when you’re stompin’ on the law They’ll stone ya when you calling Liz a squaw   But I would not fe ..read more

Thanksgiving at the Naders: Roast Thought with Stuffing by John Kendall Hawkins   Sow the Seeds of Victory! Plant and raise your own vegetables WWII-era Victory Garden slogan Call before, you dig? utility notification for unmarked Internet cables from hippy who finally got a job   The other day, minding my own business, and getting lots of unwanted help doing so, I got a welcome Tweet push from the 86 year old Ralph Nader inviting me to visit with him at Latitude Adjustment where he’d been interviewed about his new book, The Ralph Nader Family Cookbook: Classic Recipes from Leba ..read more

Abba Bina, aka Mr. Shit. Photo by John Hawkins Straining in the new-fangled Roman outhouse, Titus was sitting there with a shit-eating grin, drawing conclusions on the wall: Nero was here. Nietzsche is peachy For a good time call Viagara on DCI-MMI-CCCV. Trombones featured in the third movement of his bowel symphony, a turgid presto, and he was complaining about the new toilet tax levied by his father, the emperor Vespasian. His Dad, just back from slaying all the usurers, had quipped, index finger skyward, like Socrates, “Pecunia non olet,” which is to say Money Doesn’t Stink. To which Titus ..read more

05/28/20 George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. NYTimes. By John Kendall Hawkins   The riot squad is restless They need somewhere to go Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row”   Derek the chauvinist piggy Up to his knee in neck All coz George wanted a ciggy And paid for a pack with dreck   Repeat: I can’t breathe, he said I can’t breathe: sixteen times a mindfulness exercise gone code red Derek up to his neck in crimes   Lawdy, why, just yesterday it seems We were modelling new Covid kerchiefs On blue screen catwalks, zoom-zoom streams Buffer zone fantasies, locked in like thieves ..read more

By John Kendall Hawkins Those Ancient Men of Genius who rifled Nature by the Torch-Light of Reason even to her very Nudities, have been run a-ground in this unknown Channel; the Wind has blown out the Candle of Reason, and left them all in the Dark. Daniel Defoe, The Storm (1704) When author James Dunkerley tells would-be readers of Crusoe and his Consequences that the first thing they should do before reading his book is re-visit Defoe’s castaway saga, I let out a groan. Such re-reading is a sensible approach. But I never got over the many troubling questions I was left with after making ..read more

By John Kendall Hawkins   Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow come about in them; or yet again, their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a second visibility. Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind The opening line of “No Makeup,” the fourth poem in Sharon Olds’ new collection, Arias, chuckled me up some: “Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.” It’s funny, has a political edge, and gets you naughtily thinking about all the people out there hiding behind masks. (I saw a girl the other day and wondered whether all those Broadw ..read more

  By John Kendall Hawkins “And the day came  / when the risk / to remain tight / in a bud / was more painful / than the risk / it took  / to blossom.” – Anaïs Nin, “Risk” “April is the cruelest month, breeding / lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain.”   – T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” Lucid dreaming means to be aware that you are dreaming while doing so.  Probably we’ve all had these kinds of dreams. Therapies have been built around lucid dreaming. Books have been written, sometimes equating it to an outer-body ..read more

by John Kendall Hawkins “There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that, everything is possible.” – Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-51 For those of us who grew up watching Charlton Heston films, we can recall enactments of heroic courage, both in the early development and later downward decline of human civilization. Heston gave us a magnificent Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), returning all scraggly from the wilderness, like some people I knew in the Sixties returning from poetry communes, holding up that Decalogue in revolutionary resistance to t ..read more

OR Book Going Rouge by John Kendall Hawkins The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! – William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us”   To Hell with the MIddle Class! Oh, wait. They’re already there. At least that’s what David Roediger argues in his new book The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History. There is no there there worth saving. Fuck it. What is it even? One minute it’s this, another minute it’s that. Did you e ..read more

by John Kendall Hawkins “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, 1848 A few weeks ago New Yorker magazine published a cartoon titled “Glass Ceiling,” which depicted a father and his little daughter looking out the window of an office high up in a skyscraper. The caption read, “Someday, all of this glass ceiling will be yours.” You chuckle, because it’s funny; but then you go ahead and think about it. Then ..read more