this hurts me more than it hurts you

imagine a skeleton
imagine a skeleton
at work
imagine a skeleton
at her desk
in
her cubicle
the framed photo
of
her skeleton wife
and skeleton kids
trying to smile

-----

hieroglyphics
on your keyboard
cave paintings
on your keyboard
the first sharp rock
threw through
the first human neck
on your keyboard

the first ape
to write i love you
with a sharp rock
on the bones of
another
ape

the first atheist
to cry out
oh
science
while cumming
on
your
back

the first robot to
complain
about
capitalism

the first A.I.
to
write a poem

Excerpt from "Infinite Jest"

It's funny what you don't recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember — my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home's backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out of the cold yard. March or early April. The garden's area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine. Orin was removing rocks and hard clods from the Moms's path as she worked the rented Rototiller, a wheelbarrow-shaped, gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa, the Moms very tall and having to stoop painfully to hold on, her feet leaving drunken prints in the tilled earth. He remembers that in the middle of the tilling I came tear-assing out the door and into the backyard wearing some sort of fuzzy red Pooh-wear, crying, holding out something he said was really unpleasant-looking in my upturned palm. He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold — Orin posits from some dark corner of the Weston home's basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. 'I ate this,' was what I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms, who had her contacts out for the dirty work, and at first, bending way down, saw only her crying child, hand out, proffering; and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out — as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges? O. stood there, he says, hefting a cold clod, playing with the Velcro on his puffy coat, watching as the Moms, bent way down to me, hand reaching, her lowering face with its presbyopic squint, suddenly stopped, froze, beginning to I.D. what it was I held out, countenancing evidence of oral contact with same. He remembers her face as past describing. Her outstretched hand, still Rototrembling, hung in the air before mine.

'I ate this,' I said.

'Pardon me?’

O. says he can only remember (sic) saying something caustic as he lim-boed a crick out of his back. He says he must have felt a terrible impending anxiety. The Moms refused ever even to go into the damp basement. I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit.

O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety. In his first memory, the Moms's path around the yard is a broad circle of hysteria:

'God!' she calls out.

'Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden's rectangle while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria. Suburban neighbors' heads appeared in windows and over the fences, looking. O. remembers me tripping over the garden's laid-out twine, getting up dirty, crying, trying to follow.

'God! Help! My son ate this! Help!' she kept yelling, running a tight pattern just inside the square of string; and my brother Orin remembers noting how even in hysterical trauma her flight-lines were plumb, her footprints Native-American-straight, her turns, inside the ideogram of string, crisp and martial, crying 'My son ate this! Help!' and lapping me twice before the memory recedes.

A Look at Israeli Racism

"So what's your solution?" by Moshe Arens

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1089751.html

This editorial is by Moshe Arens, former Minister of Defense and Foreign Minister of Israel. Arens is a member of the Likud party, the major center-right political party in Israel. The newspaper is the Haaretz, a left-leaning daily that has been described as "the most prestigious Israeli newspaper" and "Israel's liberal beacon". Neither the author who wrote this editorial, nor the paper that published it, can be considered the fringe of Israeli political thought.

For Arens, an axiom (#2) necessary for any negotiations of a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is: “There is a limit to the size of the minority population that can be included within the borders of the State of Israel without endangering the Jewish state's ethnic coherence.” This is an extraordinary statement. Imagine other politicians making equivalent statements. A white American politician calling for the deportation of blacks and Hispanics so as not to “endanger the state’s ethnic coherence”. Imagine Han Chinese, Iraqi Shiites, South African blacks, or Indian Hindus calling for the depopulation of minorities in their respective countries. This sort of blatant racism would be considered outrageous by the international community if it came from anywhere other than Israel.

This racism is mostly overlooked by the West because the state of Israel, as it currently exists, is inherently racist. To renounce the views of politicians like Moshe Arens, would call into question our entrenched policy of being a loyal ally with Israel. To accept the current state of Israel, one has to accept that Jews are superior to Arabs, and that Jews have more of a right to live in this land than other peoples.

Enacted two years after the founding of the state of Israel, and now a cornerstone of Israeli national identity, the Law of Return gives the Jews of the world the right to settle in Israel and be made citizens. Arabs, despite having equally significant historical and religious ties to the land, are officially considered less worthy to live in the state of Israel. Imagine if a law like this existed in the U.S., and did the equivalent for whites or Christians, inviting and giving them preferential treatment merely because of their religious-ethnic similarity to the majority.

This intrinsic racism can be seen in the existence and expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Under military occupation since 1967, the Palestinian territories are now home to nearly half a million Israeli settlers. These Israeli settlers are not subject to the same military and local laws as the Palestinians. This has created a system where settlers enjoy liberties and legal guarantees that are denied to Palestinians. The UN security council, the International Court of Justice, the EU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all consider the Israeli settlements to be illegal. Israelis argue they have a right to build these illegal settlements because of the “Bible and the history of Jewish people”. That Jewish people lived in the area within the last 2,000 years is, in the Israeli view, enough justification for the flagrant violation of international law.

Moshe Arens use of the term ‘Judea and Samaria’ for what is internationally known as ‘the West Bank’, reveals the religious motivation of his racism. The terms Judea and Samaria are used to demonstrate a biblical Jewish connection to the land and thus supply the rationale for contemporary Jewish control over the area.

New Words and Etymologies

Newly discovered words

4/22/2009

Exegesis - Critical explanation or analysis, especially of a text. GREEK: exegeisthai “explain, interpret,” from ex- “out” + hegeisthai “to lead, guide.”

Invidious - Tending to rouse ill will, animosity, or resentment. LATIN: invidiosus “envious,” from invidia “ill will”. Consider: envy

Braggadocio – A braggart. Stock character in drama, such as Shakepeare’s Falstaff. From: Brag, braggen, ORIGIN UNKNOWN

Cardamom - A rhizomatous Indian herb having capsular fruits with aromatic seeds used as a spice or condiment. GREEK: kardamōmon : kardamon, “cress” + amōmon, an Indian spice

Eidetic - Marked by or involving extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall especially of visual images; technical term for ‘photographic memory’; GREEK: eidos, “form”

Rhizomatous - A horizontal, usually underground stem that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Also called rootstalk, rootstock. GREEK: rhiza, “root”

4/23/2009

Transgenic - Of, relating to, or being an organism whose genome has been altered by the transfer of a gene or genes from another species or breed. LATIN: trans-, “beyond, across, over” + ENGLISH: genic, “produced or generating something” OR “relating to genes”

Catechism – A summary or exposition of religious doctrine. GREEK: katechizein, “teach orally, instruct by word of mouth,”

———————————————————————————————————-

Etymological origins discovered

4/22/2009

Spawn – LATIN: expandere, “to spread out, pour out”; The notion is of a “spreading out” of fish eggs released in water.

Tadpole - tadde “toad” OLD ENGLISH: tadige, tadie + pol “head” MIDDLE DUTCH: pol “head, top.”

Fall - OLD ENGLISH: feallan. Noun sense of “autumn” (now only in U.S.) is 1664, short for fall of the leaf (1545).

Autumn - LATIN: autumnus, a word probably of Etruscan origin. Harvest was the Eng. name for the season until autumn began to displace it 16c.

Narcoleptic – GREEK: narke, “numbness, stupor” (consider: narcotic) + lepsis, “an attack, seizure.”

Remember – LATIN: rememorari “recall to mind, remember,” from re- “again” + memorari “be mindful of,” from memor “mindful”. Consider: memory

Jism – DISPUTED: Probably related to Jazz, which has an undetermined etymology. Possibly african or gaelic origin. AMERICAN

Root – OLD NORSE: rot, “root”

4/23/2009

Fluorescent – Glowing in ultraviolet light. Coined by Eng. mathematician and physicist Sir George G. Stokes (1819-1903) from fluorspar(fluorine), because in it he first noticed the phenomenon, + ending -escence from opalescence, phosphorescence

Fluorine – Element 9, symbol F. LATIN: fluor, “a flowing, flow”. Consider: fluent

Ibid. – LATIN: ibidem, “in the same place,” from ibi, “there” + demonstrative suffix -dem.

Terrace – LATIN: terra, “earth, land”. Consider: terrain

Indonesia – LATIN: indus, “india” + GREEK: nesos, “island”

New Words and Etymologies

Newly discovered words

4/20/2009

Gendarme – Military unit that functions as police. OLD FRENCH: gens d’armes, “men-at-arms”

Enceinte adj. - Carrying an unborn child; pregnant. LATIN: inciens, “pregnant”

4/21/09

Besot – To muddle or stupefy, as with alcoholic liquor or infatuation. LATE OLD ENGLISH: sott, “stupid person, fool,”

Liminal – Relating to a threshold. LATIN: limen, “threshold”. Consider: subliminal.

Peccadillo - a slight offense; a petty fault. LATIN: peccatum, “a sin, fault, error”

Noviate – the period of training and preparation that a novice member of a religious order undergoes prior to taking vows. Consider: novice - “probationer in a religious order,” from LATIN: novicius “newly imported, inexperienced” (of slaves), from novus “new”

Catabolism – (chemistry) destructive metabolism, usually including the release of energy and breakdown of materials. GREEK. Kata, “down” + ballein, “to throw”

Parturition – childbirth. LATIN: parturīre, “to be in labor”

Atavism - The return of a trait or recurrence of previous behavior after a period of absence. LATIN: atavus “ancestor,”

Apotropaic – Intended to ward off evil. GREEK: apo-, “from” + trepein, “to turn”. Consider: apostrophe

Apostate – one who forsakes his religion or faith. GREEK: apostasia “defection, desertion, rebellion,”; apo-, “away from” + stenai, “stand”

Wapper-jawed/Whopper-jawed – Askew.

Wapper – “to blink the eyes, to move tremulously”. DUTCH: wapperen, “to swing, oscillate, or waver.”

Anagoge /Anagogic - A mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife. GREEK: anagein, “to lift up”

Chthonic - Of or relating to the underworld, lit. “belonging to the earth”. GREEK: khthōn, earth

———————————————————————————————————-

Etymological origins discovered

4/20/2009

Sine Qua Non - “(a condition) without which it could not be”. LATIN

Chattel - Slave. OLD FRENCH: chatel, property or goods. Application to slaves (1649) is a rhetorical figure of abolitionists, etc.

Taliban - Student PASHTO, ARABIC.

Felicity – Great happiness. LATIN: Felix, “happiness”

Demur - To voice opposition, object; delay, linger. LATIN: de- + morari “to delay,” from mora “a pause, delay.”

Ameliorate – To make better. LATIN: melior “better,”

Etiology - Science of causes or causation. GREEK: aitia “cause” + -logia “speaking.”

Pith - The essential or central part. OLD ENGLISH: piþa “pith of plants,” also “essential part,”

Apartheid – S. African policy of racial segregation. AFRIKAANS: apartheid (1929 in a S.African socio-political context), lit. “separateness,” DUTCH: apart “separate” (from Fr. àpart) + suffix -heid, cognate of Eng. -hood.

Betwixt and between - In an intermediate position; neither wholly one thing nor another. OLD ENGLISH: betweox, from bi- “by” + tweox “for two,”

4/21/09

Neophyte – new convert. GREEK: neophytos, lit. “newly planted,” from neos “new” + -phytos “planted,”

Isomorphism – GREEK. isos, “equal” + morphē, “shape”

Neologism – practice of innovation in language; new word or expression. GREEK: neo + logo

Antinomian – The belief that moral laws are relative in meaning and application as opposed to fixed or universal. GREEK: anti- “opposite, against” + nomos “rule, law”

Gall – bile. OLD ENGLISH: galla