Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

“Now what are you ladies drinking today?” Buck kind of started at that. Then he grinned again. “Hey . . . That’s funny. Ladies.”
“—as in football practice,” the bartender said. “Or the Marines . . . take your pick.”

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst human beings have to offer , you find out you’re wrong. There’s no end to evil.

Barbara thinks, I wouldn’t be the first poet to go to jail.

She likes to think (but doesn’t quite believe) there’s a kind of providence at work in matters of right and wrong, blind but powerful, like that statue of Lady Justice holding out her scales. That there’s a force in the affairs of men and women standing on the side of the weak and unsuspecting, and against evil.

No, not to sleep, he thinks, only a doze. Real relief will begin later, with the girl’s liver. And then nourishing soups, stews, filets, and cutlets.

Capitalism is a global production in which states play an enormously important role, but in every case it transcends these states.

Families were intricate institutions, more complex in many ways than the stock exchange or the joint-stock company. Women played a key role in building and managing them...

The capitalism that we know originated in the great connecting during what scholars have called the long sixteenth century, the period between about 1450 and 1640.

A tenth-century monk described a community of merchants as “wicked and lawless men, who habitually pooled their resources to pay for unbridled orgies.”

Jup, good old capitalism in action.

...nascent capitalists were nevertheless often viewed with suspicion—hostility, even—by both commoners and elites who considered the idea of capital multiplying itself unethical and illegitimate. For many onlookers, making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery, or plain theft than to productive engagement with the earth, which was generally considered the proper form of economic life.

Just as important for accelerating the commercialization of economic life and promoting the role of merchants was another innovation—paper money. An early eleventh-century Chinese invention, the jiaozi, a form of promissory note, came about on the initiative of Chinese rulers—two hundred years before similar developments took place in Europe...

Capitalism’s origins cannot be explained by finding a kernel from which it sprouted. Its history is a globally networked process that sprang from the building of islands of capital that by their very nature, their raison d’être, were always linking to one another.

Embracing a historical, global, and multicausal approach helps us understand something that is in some ways puzzling—namely, capitalism’s staying power. And it lets us see capitalism’s great strength: flexibility on a world scale.

Microwaving kills most nutrients, it’s a known fact. No wonder so many Americans are so unhealthy; that kind of cooking should be banned by law.

There really are more things in heaven and earth than most people believe, Hamlet was right about that.

There are many uses for the brains of their livestock, and such organs as the heart and kidneys, but the liver is what matters most, because it is the consumption of the human liver that preserves vitality and lengthens life.

If you think of literature as a town, then those who read and write poetry are the poor relations who live in shanties across the tracks.

At which point—just half on the counter, like it was—the linoleum with the rat on it fell off to thump on the floor. Mamma jerked around to see where it had fallen—on its side, it stiff feet clawing air. More maggots spilled the mouth between the little teeth, wriggling on the bare wood. One crawled out the eye.
“Irene,” Jolene asked, “you still want that sauerkraut?”

“I always wanted to wear clothes like this. But I figure, if I don’t make myself look like a goddam Christmas tree, nobody’s even going to look in my direction.”

When Barbara says some of the new ones aren’t good, aren’t finished, the old poet waves her objections away. Says it doesn’t matter. Says the important thing is to keep the channel open and the words flowing . “If you don’t,” she says, “your channel may silt up. And then dry up.”

“Yeah. Okay. I mean it, though. Any time you have to go. Like I am for your Dad, I want to be your . . .” He took another big breath, reached up with his hand and wiped the back across his mouth. “Well, your personal toilet bowl.”

“So you see, gettin’ kicked outta school, bein’ stupid, jerkin’ off all the time, that kind of stuff—” He looked down at me seriously—“that don’t matter none. I was just the same, like you. I did it. And I got me a good job. And I got me one great kid, who’s just like his old man—that’s you.” Grinning, he pushed my head, so that I grinned back. “And now I got me a divorce—like everybody else.”

The Saduskys was on welfare is what it was. But back then everybody said social security—’cause it sounded better.

She sure liked to do it, but she couldn’t suck dick for shit. It made me wish to hell Joey was back over from the high school. (I think guys suck it better ’cause they got one too and we know what it feels like.) But I got to lick her titties (her right one was bigger than the left) and licked out her pussy, which is what got me the hottest; then I licked her asshole, like Joey had licked mine...

Donny at the refrigerator and Yvonne at the table were both looking at me now. Suddenly Donny smiled—I guess he recognized me. Lifting the baby’s brown fist, he made it wave.
The little face was looking stupid, though. Then I smiled.

“Young kids are so stupid. They won’t learn nothin’ from you—and you can’t teach them nothin’ anyway.”

One old white guy sat there with them. He was laughing and drinking out their bottle and joking with them‑but not as loud. The black guys was a calling each other “nigger” this and “nigger” that—like the kids in school. But not the old white guy. A couple of dogs ran up, looked at them, then walked away. As I went on by, that’s when it kind of hit me: Most of you didn’t like that word—from most of us.

Outside the open door, Francine muttered, “ . . . motherfuckin’ crazy sons of bitches . . .!” By the door I could see her hitting down at her dress. “. . . crazy goddamn no good—” It sounded funny: My mamma cussed some, but never like that. “It ain’t even six o’clock in the morning! They’re already shootin’—?”

The irony that I’m a middle-class black guy who’s become the amanuensis to a semi‑literate once homeless redneck has not escaped me. Or Shoat.

“That’s all right for you literary types,” he says to Emily. “Most writing has been done in a lockdown environment since time immemorial, but aren’t we supposed to follow the science, according to the great Dr. Fauci? What about lab time, for God’s sake? Bio labs? Chemistry and physics labs? What about them? Labs are science!”