Showing posts with label C.K.Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label C.K.Williams. Show all posts

Sunday, May 6, 2012

“Watching the Telly With Nietzsche” by C.K. Williams. - Slate Magazine

A sad fact is that we are a nations of shut ins, finally, no matter how much our media informs us that we love to go places and see things and get to know the doings of the indigenous in neighborhoods not our own. Perhaps we are, to a large extent, desperate for vacation and the illusion of having enough walking around money to spend some days in a generic hotel room, visiting corporate water parks in all fifty states. Millions  are the sort who just channel surf until the end of the day, from time we get out of bed to the conclusion of all things concerning the twenty four hours that has just ebbed away like so many dust motes floating half seen on a breeze in a darkening twilight.

This where millions of us have our discussions of things going on, things that have happened, the political low down, the double crosses,the trends and the fads that make us stupider and less likely to call bullshit when bullshit is served. This is , perhaps ,a rich source for monologues among discontents who are on their  way out the door to the Big Room, and it has been explored to wonderful results in the work of Beckett--he had the genius to verbalize the death rattle in which the significant parts of a man's life is reduced to a repetitive , percussive stammer that never articulates as a memory truly forged.

C.K .Williams , though,in the grouchy poem linked to in the post title, merely seems in a hurry to deliver caustic comment on everything his gaze glazes over; everything is a target, nothing is sacred, nothing is revealed but a crank with a remote control and a room full of books. I imagine the cliched image of someone in a study full of books , piles of them, and and unsorted papers, unfinished writing assignments. The windows all have the shades drawn, save a tear or too that allows a thin beam to play intensely on a picture of an insane German philosopher who could never quite make himself understood.