Tag Archives: T. S. Eliot

And so it begins.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

If you’re reading this, then I have sad/happy news for you. And perhaps not the most surprising of news…

This is post #900 on ye olde Counterforce. We haven’t been as prolific as we used to be, and we haven’t been as loud and verbal, and maybe we haven’t been as excited as we should. We’ve enjoyed a moment together and we’re going to enjoy many, many more as well, but I don’t think this next part will shock you: Counterforce is going to end with post #1000.

Why end it there? Why not just end it here, or tomorrow, or four months ago? Because it’s going to end with #1000, that’s fucking why. Because the time is now and because I think this particular iteration of what you know as Counterforce is ending – if I can be as heavy handed as possible – and it has to end before the next aeon can be born. But it needs to go in its own way, in its own style, and with a little celebration. And a little dark forecasting of what lays beyond.

We’re not planning to bury it. At least, that’s not my intention. It’s coming to the end and I hope to leave its exquisite corpse just laying around for people to enjoy. But this isn’t a funeral. This is going to be a fucking dance party with eulogies and crazy LOLcat GIFs. There’s plenty more YouTube embeds and shit talking and Jackface pictures and theorizing about the fate of Don Draper to come before we sign off at this particular URL. We’re still going to talk about the things we like and love and hate and detest while also being super mega self-referential and taking this thing so far down the rabbit hole and up our own asses that the sunrise/set will seem like a perpetual strobe effect.

In short, we’re going out with banging and whimpering, and hopefully both in rhythmic and wonderful succession.

I remember that when the 80s ended, as U2 had their final concert of the decade, they went out on this intensely ominous note, telling their audience that they had to go away for a while and dream it all up again. Most people walked out of that decade thinking their favorite band was over, gone forever, but that wasn’t the case.

Again, that’s a bit heavy handed, but I’m this close to embedding Semisonic videos and telling you that every new beginning starts from some other beginning’s end. Perhaps instead I’ll just tell you that you don’t have to go home, but you just can’t stay here.

Not forever, anyway.

Anyway. Count your fucking blessings. You were lucky enough to know us and enjoy this time and this place and moment. We were lucky enough to know you and fap fap fap fap fap about things we liked or thought were important. And we’re doing to keep doing that here for another 100 posts, and we’ll keep doing it elsewhere. There is, for example, the podcast to brighten and enrich your days now. That’ll be an ever evolving thing. Put it in your ears and your mind. And keep your eyes coming back here for the next 100 posts. The final 100 posts.

And then when you close your eyes, all will go dark. But when you open them again, perhaps there’ll be something new there, just waiting for you to see it.

I hope everyone will come back. Everyone who has ever done anything with this site, or wanted to, and everyone who has ever read it. I want to bathe in all the old jokes and callbacks and motifs and references and the things we loved. I want the old shit to make friends with the new shit and then take the new shit behind the middle school and get it pregnant. And, with any luck, Counterforce will end this year. It’s kind of exciting to think that our last dance would take us right up to the stroke of midnight at the end of the world, right?

What, Whence, and Whereto.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Picture from here.

The risk of going too far.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Meanwhile on the internet…

Some bullshit happening somewhere.

Beck and Palin “letterbombed” via Facebook by Stephen Colbert fans.

Don’t forget: The Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally is tomorrow.

The recent Halloween episode of Modern Family is a pretty good example of that show at it’s finest.

There’s two new planets out there, fuck yeah.

Inside the war between Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno.

Ellen cured Portia’s fear of eating out.

My husband wants me to imitate animals in the bedroom.

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

-T.S. Eliot.

One of my favorite words in our current existence: Cyberwar!

Dear DC Comics: Please fucking reprint Flex Mentallo already.

The pictures in this post are actually paintings by Andy Denzler and can be found here.

True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten to play Charles Manson. I can totally see it.

Newly released files show Hitler’s daily routine.

The world’s most precise clocks could reveal that the world is a hologram.

Your fingers know when you make a typo.

Tongues of flame.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will to be arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

-T. S. Eliot.

From “Little Gidding.” You can find more of the Four Quartets here, and more of this particularly amazing poet on Counterforce is located both here and here. Pictures from here and here, and especially from here.

Accidental stars.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

For your Saturday night, a poem:

“Hysteria”

by T. S. Eliot

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: “If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden…” I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.

I’ve thought about posting more poems here in the month of April, but then it didn’t work out that way. But so far, posting a few by T. S. Eliot, one of my favorite poets, isn’t so bad. Especially since, in my internet reading travels, I keep seeming to happen across articles about Eliot’s sex life…

Among some talk of you and me…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, to arrive where you are, to get from where you are not…

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know, and what you own is what you do not own, and where you are is where you are not.

The words above are from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot, from Four Quartets. Pictures from here, here, here, and here. And, below, via Alex Fischer.

For one time and one place.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Tonight’s movie:

Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker, who’d previously done the short film La Jetée, which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys.

The film is an experiment take on the documentary and the travelogue as a ficticious filmmaker sends footage and letters back to a woman, who narrates/shares with us his thoughts. It moves from place to place, not really concerned with narrative, and spends some time in Japan, Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco, where it pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing Vertigo, probably my favorite film ever.

The film deals a lot with the ideas of travel and loneliness and memory (“remembering is not the opposite of forgetting“) and the idea that our memories can be replaced with film as a document, amongst other things. This is one of those movies I put on when I want to relax and it never fails to do the trick.

The English version of the film opens with this quote from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place”

Marker’s an enigmatic and reclusive filmmaker, mostly sticking to the documentary form, and careful to never let himself become the subject of the story. He refuses to do interviews and when he’s asked for a picture of himself, he instead sends along a picture of his cat, Guillaume. But that’s another story for another time. I’ll leave you with live footage of Blonde Redhead performing their song “Ego Maniac Kid” in front of a project of Marker’s Battle Of Ten Million…