Dread

[gypsyjoker]

I wake up in

What did I write last night?

I have traded on compulsion for another

Typing for driving

I just don't want to read it.

At least when I drove in my sleep overnight
I had some new scenery to look at in the morning
not just that wall there.

[gypsyjoker]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFsWlq-9Nq4

[Diana Moon Glampers]

<center>The Sins of The Grand Fathers

Mothers & Sons</center>


The punk calls me, we talking and talking cause I am in goldwater foundation mode,
after about an hour he has another call coming on call waiting, he tells me he is going to put me on hold. I tell him to call me back.
Cause I am thinking about what a valuable man he has become even with his trashed childhood.


I forgot to ask him when he lost his appettite for breakfast.

[tarbaby]

<center>Yggdrassill</center>

"I give you mom. I give you the destroying mother. I give you her justice --- from which we have never removed the eye bandage. I give you the angel --- and point to the sword in her hand. I give you death --- the hundred million deaths that are muttered under Yggdrasill's ash. I give you Medusa and Stheno and Euryale. I give you the harpies and the witches and the Fates. I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion: she-popery. I give you Pandora. I give you Proserpine, the Queen of Hell. The five-and-ten-cent-store Lilith, the mother of Cain, the black widow who is poisonous and eats her mate, and I designate at the bottom of your program the grand finale of all the soap operas: the mother of America's Cinderella."

Generation of Vipers, quoted in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by J. Rose.

[constantine]

elaborate , if you will. is this a novel, or a collection of poetry?

i've got a beautful poem by george seferis - i'll post it here if you don't mind. your quote triggered off in my head. wait a minute.


Mycenae by George Seferis, 1935
(trans. Philip Sherrard)

Give me your hands, give me your hands, give me
your hands.

I have seen in the night
the sharp peak of the mountain,
seen the plain beyond flooded
with the light of an invisible moon,
seen, turning my head,
black stones huddled
and my life taut as a chord
beginning and end
the final moment:
my hands.

Sinks whoever raises the great stones;
I've raised these stones as long as I was able
I've loved these stones as long as I was able
these stones, my fate.
Wounded by my own soil
tortured by my own shirt
condemned by my own gods,
these stones.

I know that they don't know, but I
who've followed so many times
the path from killer to victim
from victim to punishment
from punishment to the next murder,
groping
the inexhaustible purple
that night of the return
when the Furies began whistling
in the meager grass -
I've seen snakes crossed with vipers
knotted over the evil generation
our fate.

Voices out of the stone out of sleep
deeper here where the world darkens,
memory of toil rooted in the rhythm
beaten upon the earth by feet
forgotten.
Bodies sunk into the foundations
of the other time, naked. Eyes
fixed, fixed on a point
that you can't make out, much as you want to:
the soul
struggling to become your own soul.

Not even the silence is now yours
here where the mill stones have stopped turning.

[diesel dyke]

Beforee I answer you let me tell you that I am missing this bit below between the lines, it should be posted above somewhere, I will edit it in the sequence later.

__________________________________________________

<center>
The Sins Of the Fathers.
</center>

The kid was paying for the sins of his mother's fathers

She was a woman with issues
He was her son
maybe four or five years old
he used to love breakfast
he looked so happy when she gave him his bacon and eggs
He is in his twenties now and hardly ever eats breakfast
and I wonder if he rembers when he lost his appetite

____________________________________________________

Okay now back to your question

Would I mind if you posted a poem here?
You must be joking, here is probably more information than you wanted.

The Generation of Vipers was a major book of the forties and fifties, none read anymore. It is mentioned in Plath's poem The BabySitters

O what has come over us, my sister!
On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get
We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups' icebox
And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read
Aloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.
So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted ---
A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,
Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing
But ten years dead.

you can read the whole poem Here

Here is a long scroll from an article about The Generation of Vipers from the Washington Post.

'Generation of Vipers' Loses Its Bite

By Jonathan Yardley

Saturday, July 30, 2005; Page C01

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

In the spring of 1942, a writer named Philip Wylie left Washington and went home to Miami Beach "after a stretch in 'government war information' -- ill, discouraged and frustrated." He sat at his typewriter and began to vent about the "cancer of the soul" with which he felt his fellow countrymen were afflicted. Fueled with anger -- and, one likes to imagine, several quarts of 100-proof Old Mencken -- he let fly. Here's a sample:



Nobody escaped Philip Wylie's howling wrath, not even moms. (By E. Allen Becker -- Doubleday)
"Washington is . . . the stone symbol of rapacity converted to smugness, of tawdry imitation which is a condemnation of America as unoriginal and servile, as well as a revelation of the ghastly turn of our subconscious minds. This orgiastic claptrap has no honest meaning or no open purpose, and it is not livable. It is, rather, a smothering of the soul or a gallows boast, perfervid and florid -- an unwitting confusion of peewee excesses, of niggling lavishnesses, and of misapprehensions of the phony for the real and the swinish for the good. To abide in it composedly is to be either a lama beyond reach of all earthly things or perilously mistaken in the acceptance of slack composure as inviting, when it is hell's latchstring."

On and on he rolled, a veritable Mississippi of bile, churning out word upon word to a total of some 100,000, just about every one of them quivering with rage -- though whether real or simulated rage remains unclear to this day. From May 12 to July 4 he hammered away, and by January 1943 the result was in the bookstores: "Generation of Vipers," published by Farrar and Rinehart in an edition of 4,000 copies, "a number commensurate with sales of my previous books and one I thought high for the current treatise." Those words were written by Wylie in December 1954 in his introduction to the book's 20th printing, by which time it had sold more than 180,000 copies and stirred a furious national debate.

Small wonder. If there was a single group that Wylie failed to offend, its name is not recorded. Businessmen, doctors, scientists, preachers, the military, boosters, statesmen, professors -- whack! whack! whack! He demolished each and every one. Most particularly, and most famously, he demolished "mom" and the "momism" that was his coinage for the worship accorded to her. Here's a tiny taste of what he did to her:

"Mom . . . is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She nonetheless spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations, pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks, and the like -- and fools nobody except herself. If a man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time for mom to feel for her pocketbook, and this occasionally does happen."

Wylie was convinced that momism was yet one more manifestation of the madness into which America had descended by the 1940s, but he was a pretty wild and crazy guy himself. Born in 1902 in Massachusetts, educated for a while at Princeton, he seems to have been one of those WASPs who claim proprietary interest in the country and lament what everyone else has done to it; I know the type well because I'm the son of one. He was a successful screenwriter and novelist, specializing in science fiction. His two best-known novels, both published in the 1930s, are "When Worlds Collide" and "Gladiator"; the latter is commonly understood to have been a main influence on the Superman comic books, which shared Wylie's admiration for the superior being in a world of weak mediocrities. He worked away at fiction and nonfiction until his death in 1970, but though several of his novels are still in print and read by sci-fi enthusiasts, it is for "Generation of Vipers" that he is best known.

I first read it in the 1960s, when I was in my twenties. During the 1950s, like a great many other Americans, I had admired the many books that took a critical view of American society -- "The Lonely Crowd," by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer; "The Power Elite," by C. Wright Mills; "The Organization Man," by William H. Whyte; "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," by Sloan Wilson; "The Hidden Persuaders," by Vance Packard -- and eventually turned to "Generation of Vipers" because it promised to be in the same mold, albeit of an earlier period.

Picking it up again after four decades, I remembered little about it except (of course) mom and a general atmosphere of splenetic outrage. As it turned out, "Generation of Vipers" did not come through a second reading in very good shape. The spectacle of someone making an absolute fool of himself is always enjoyable, so watching Wylie put himself through these ridiculous paces was amusing, but "Generation of Vipers" is warmed-over H.L. Mencken with only occasional hints of Mencken's wit or perspicacity. Along the way Wylie says a few smart things, but give a chimpanzee 100,000 words and one or two of them are likely, against all odds, to make a bit of sense. Mostly the book is high-octane twaddle, fun to read but incapable of withstanding close scrutiny.

You can read the rest of it
here

The bit about the Yggdrassill I don't know why yet.

[diesel dyke]

I just noticed you posted the poem.
tank you very much

Just scaned it so far

I may have to get some sleep before I read it more carefuly, I got pixelated eyeballs tonight.

no reason for the sock pupptett other than I like the tag line. I am sure I spelled pupett wrong, how many combinations and permutations of the letters p and t can their be?

man did somebody say something aboot verbiage and herbiage, yeah I been into the bitter herbs tonight, could you tell?

[constantine]

me too. thanks for the info about wylie. in ohio, we have an inter-university library loan system called the ohio link that enables access to any of the university libraries of which their are many. it has never failed me. i'll order his book and check it out.

[stilltrucking]

RE: this too shall pass

My google seacrch started here

http://www.kerrytribe.com/neon.html

I liked the next "project" in the series too

http://www.kerrytribe.com/bench.html

[stilltrucking]

geez judi I just did a straight forward google on the hebrew text
"gam zeh ya’avor"which I found here
http://www.kerrytribe.com/neon.html

after I had googled the English words this too shall pass
Then I googled gam zeh ya’avor
which took me to the hebrew text
גם זה יעבור‎
which I found on wikipedia

This too shall pass - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"This too shall pass" (Hebrew: גם זה יעבור‎, gam zeh yaavor) is a phrase occurring in a Jewish wisdom folktale involving King Solomon. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

which I am taking with a grain of salt it could be hebrew for kiss my ass for all I know.

I found a useful progran called wiki scan
lets you track the ISP address of who is editing a wicki

Sometimes oil company execs are editing posts about oil, or someone from the EPA is editing a wicki about polution being good for you.

I hope that helps
makes it all clear as mud.