Before You're Sixty-Four.

[Geoffrey]

annie blue wrote:
>IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S A PIECE OF FICTION!

You are calling him a liar? You are saying it's a lie, aren't you? The son of God told people: "I am the good shepherd!" That's a pleasant way of saying: "I am the good butcher!" It's manipulating rhetoric. Is the kerb-stone lower because the pavement is sinking, or because there's a new layer of tarmac on the road? Look Annie, at the attempts at 'poetry' one can see proudly displayed in this section. In comparison Andrew's work leaves them all standing on the platform long after the last train. He may not nail Rembrandts on top of cave paintings, he may not be Britain's new Shakespeare - but in company with the doggerel posted here his verse is like champagne being served in the Sahara. Yet he over-estimates the apparently stunted and under-developed intellectual growth of the many in his clan, believing they are immune to his influence. Morons have difficulty determining fact from fiction; and they have impressionable minds. Instead of setting an example to readers he leads them not through the valley of the shadow but builds a house for them slap-bang in the middle of it. See how the man who kicks a football between goal-posts receives glory, but is he not merely the final link of a chain? The player who passed the ball to him is like the shepherd who passes his sheep to the slaughterhouse. Those sweet little lambs never grow old and die a natural death - the shepherd, whether he's good or bad, sees to that. Look at the sticky red crosses daubed onto the doors. Look on your plate, under the mint-sauce. The sexual rendezvous invented by Andrew's wishful thinking hadn't come to pass - it was written in future tense. We can conjecture that moisture entering atmosphere on the sun-starved side of the moon could cause the lunar landscape to become green with moss - like the north side of a tree-trunk. But like Adam Cohen, who can never step out of that shadow will tell you: it isn't easy being the son of a great man. Have you never wondered why Jesus didn't want a son? Take the wool from your eyes. Because the cruel, cold and wicked hand of fate can not only throw paternal love into the back of the dustcart, it can also dress a wolf in the warmth of a sacrificial lamb's fleece. Pass the horseradish sauce, please. I am not asking anyone to train sheepdogs into rounding up flocks of shepherds for the abattoir, I am simply pointing the way up out out this drain and into the sunlight. Let's show that we can write nice clean stuff.

[damellon]

Let's show that we can write nice clean stuff.
Geoffrey - Aren't you missing the point here? What distinguishes the poet/writer from the rest of us is his willingness and ability to put into words the ideas that we can't. His remit, if it's fair to say he has one, is to do exactly what you don't want him to do - to see, to try to understand, and to tell us honestly his idea of life, all of life, not just the 'nice clean stuff'. He has a responsibility to reflect the dark and the light.
It's lovely to be in the sun but what you term 'the drain' is an interesting place too and worthy of both exploration and comment.

[Geoffrey]

Aren't you missing the point here? What distinguishes the poet/writer from the rest of us is his willingness and ability to put into words the ideas that we can't. His remit, if it's fair to say he has one, is to do exactly what you don't want him to do - to see, to try to understand, and to tell us honestly his idea of life, all of life, not just the 'nice clean stuff'. He has a responsibility to reflect the dark and the light. It's lovely to be in the sun but what you term 'the drain' is an interesting place too and worthy of both exploration and comment.

Well, I wrote that message after meditating upon Andrew's poem while listening to Leonard's 'The Butcher'. My main complaint with Andrew's ditty is that is leaves no hope of redemption. At the end the reader goes sadly home after being dropped in the pit of an unfinished story, like Hitchcock did in 'The Birds'. What I yearn for is not necessarily a happy ending, but a message containing hope. People can write what they like, of course - but let them at least have the goodness to wrap it up with a moral. Is that really too hard?

[damellon]

What I yearn for is not necessarily a happy ending, but a message containing hope. People can write what they like, of course - but let them at least have the goodness to wrap it up with a moral. Is that really too hard?

Do you mean- 'is that too much to ask' or 'is that too difficult for the poet to achieve'?
In fact, I think that wrapping something up with a moral is an easy way out. Harder to respect the reader and let him make up his own mind. As for hope, your hope and my hope may be different and sometimes there's no hope.
I come back to this notion that it's the writer's prerogative to decide on his subject and his presentation and for the reader to accept/reject the work as having/not having any meaning for him. What satisfies you may not satisfy me. And what satisfies me this morning may not satisfy me tonight. For me, at least, I don't want my poet to give me words of hope or redemption unless he feels them himself and I certainly don't want him to moralise.

[Cate]

does anyone else think this is getting a tad weird? geoffrey, hang on to bitterness and you will always be sour. rise above it - as i have done twice - and you are a much better individual. how many times does a person have to say 'IT'S NOT REAL! IT'S A PIECE OF FICTION!' we all have minds and opinions of our own and an open forum here to express them, but don't you think that implying someone is in league with the devil is taking things too far, if not downright rude. whatever happened to you clearly hurt a lot, but you need to take your feelings of hurt, anger and rejection and put your energy into something more positive. maybe i'm just a naturally positive person but i've turned my life around 3times and i just think that the relationships i had before just weren't meant to be. i've always managed to come out smiling because i refuse to be beaten. i adapt. read my tag at the end of all my postings. i truly believe that, and god - should he exist - would believe that too.

i really hope you can move on and be happy. i really do.

Naw, it's not really weird yet - the key to remember is that Geoffrey is as much fiction as the poem - he's just playing. My guess is that he likes this poem just fine, why else would he pull it out again after such a long time. I suspect the only beef he might have with the poem, is how much Andrew left to the imagination - I'm not sure why though, 'Geoffrey' seems to have a fine imagination - just check out his shopping list.
I do have to wonder about the length of time he's been going on - maybe he does have some kind of an issue here or maybe he's just like a Saturday Night Live skit that keeps going and going, with him sat at home laughing himself silly.

[annie blue]

hi cate, you're most probably right. 'geoffrey' is indeed a bit of a wind up merchant and is more than likely enjoying being the centre of all this attention. i retract my earlier statement to let this run forever.let's just leave it dead, enjoy andrew's wonderful lines and leave geoffrey to the mercy of his troubled mind. he really needs to get out more

[Geoffrey]

annie blue wrote:
>'geoffrey' is . . . a wind up merchant . . . enjoying being the centre of all this attention . . . his troubled mind . . . needs to get out more. let's just leave [further comments on Andrew's work] dead.

And I am the one who is "downright rude"? What do you mean "all this attention"? This is an inconspicuous little section of Leonard's forum to which most visitors don't bother to pay any mind. A more hidden and anonymous alcove right at the bottom of a web-site one would be hard-pushed to find. That is precisely why I stay mostly here, because it is far enough away for me to feel comfortable. In this thread I have tried to keep focus mainly on Andrew's poem, discussing it not only here but also privately with an old friend who's opinion I respect highly. I have stood firm on my opinion from the beginning, have occasionally mentioned Leonard, have revealed small biographical details of myself, have been honest and forthright in my views and have enjoyed being here. I don't know what else I could have done. You may do as you wish, but kindly inform Jarkko that from now on you wish to be the one to decide how much interest a person shows in a specific piece of work - and when it is 'dead'. I will not return unless asked to do so. The floor is yours, my dear.

La Belle Sauvage
aksla@online.no

[annie blue]

you know what geoffrey, i really can't be bothered. it's too depressing in here. i notice how you pick up on the negative comments and not anything nice that i may have said to you earlier though. once again, i wish you well and hope you succeed in having a peaceful existence. over an most definitely out.

[Andrew McGeever]

you know what geoffrey, i really can't be bothered. it's too depressing in here. i notice how you pick up on the negative comments and not anything nice that i may have said to you earlier though. once again, i wish you well and hope you succeed in having a peaceful existence. over an most definitely out.

I almost agree, yet I'd invite all to read the original post: to date, there has been no comment on the title.

Maybe I'll post a nice poem with a happy ending. I'm working on it as I type, yet it doesn't appear.

Andrew.

P.S. "64" was never an erotic poem: I've written better than that.

[Geoffrey]

Andrew McGeever wrote:
>I'd invite all to read the original post: to date, there has been no comment on the title.

it's an association with the beatles' song, isn't it?

annie blue wrote:
>you know what geoffrey, i really can't be bothered. it's too depressing in here. i notice how you pick up on the negative comments and not anything nice that i may have said to you earlier though. once again, i wish you well and hope you succeed in having a peaceful existence. over an most definitely out.

you can't be bothered. oh i see. well isn't that just typical. can't be bloodywell bothered. and what nice things did you say to me? what nice things did you ever once in your life say to me then? because i'd like to know. all you ever did was bellyache about how everything i did was wrong and everytime i opened my damned mouth all i got was bellowed at. you never liked me, you couldn't stand me - admit it. i did summersaults for you, i bent over backwards trying to make you happy and what do i get in return? oh, i'm off, she says. have a nice life, she says. now you can see what i have been battling with, this is why i keep a low profile, why i don't have any confidence any more. it's as if my whole personality has been rubbed out. people stop me in the street and ask me what happened, that i should smarten myself up and have a night out on the town like i used to but how can i? how can i mix and enjoy myself knowing all the time that i make every place i go to depressing? i knew this thread was coming to a close, i could sense it coming a long way off. but i thought we could all shake hands and say it was nice making your acquaintance and things like that. i didn't for a minute think it would end with highly-strung short terse messages and then everybody running off in all directions in a huff like that. if i didn't know better i'd think that you couldn't tolerate confrontation, i'd think that maybe you couldn't handle criticism. perhaps, if the truth was known, you can be bothered - and perhaps you don't actually find it depressing in here. perhaps, if the truth was known, your problem is that you don't like a person to speak his mind, you will have politeness at the expense of honesty. well, i've had it - this is the last you see of me because if you can't be bothered then i can't either.

[blonde madonna]

P.S. "64" was never an erotic poem

Andrew you have been deliberately evasive about the meaning of your poem, encouraged this 'discussion' and not denied Geoffrey's charges, but now you have gone too far.

Your poem lies between a title adapted from a Beatle’s song with a rather prosaic view of life-long marriage, and closing lines from Dr Zhivago, a story about a passionate adulterous affair. Let it speak for itself.

BM

[Manna]

Dear Andrew,
I like your avatar.

I once suggested that the piece was a turn-down to an invitation from a lady, but in that argument, I intentionally denied the title.

I like poems where the title plays as the first line, as you've done here. I don't know why you'd want to take this person out for a lovely one-night-stand before she's 64. I've known plenty of perfectly sexy 64-year-olds, 65 year olds, and even, ahem, seventy-something-year-olds.

The Beatles song is about a long-lasting relationship, and the way it plays against the poem for me here is that you want this to be a play between you and your long-time-lover. To pretend with her that you're having an affair. For instance, sometimes I'll flirt with my husband, and he'll say, "Do you say that to all the boys?"

and I say, "Yeah, don't tell my husband, though."

Possibly. And if you make this play with your darling, then you'll get to sing the Beatles song to her.

[~greg]

I do have to wonder about the length of time he's {Geoffrey's}
been going on
- maybe he does have some kind of an issue here
or maybe he's just like a Saturday Night Live skit
that keeps going and going, with him sat at home
laughing himself silly.

Geoffrey is entertaining. You've got to give him that.
(And if you can't, then you can always, like me, entertain yourself
with fantasies of his faithful sidekick, Sideways Sue, in various ironing positions.)

Geoffrey's being entertaining must be what it is that makes
some people say that he shouldn't be taken seriously.

Being serious, and being entertaining, being incompatible states of being, after all.
Comedians being permitted to tell a joke only in order to make people happy.
Serious people being permitted to tell a joke only in order to be sarcastic.

And it makes people very nervous if they don't know, for sure,
from which of those two given directions somebody is coming from.

Nobody, after all, wants to be the last sucker taking seriously what may be a put-on.
And nobody wants to catch hell for assuming that somebody must be joking
if they aren't.

~~

I personally have completely given up trying to guess other people's motives.
For one thing, I am no good at it, at all. And for another thing, many people
just don't have any motives that can be described as simply as "serious" vs "joking".
I know I don't. And when anybody says I do, - that I am "serious"or "not serious"
about this or that, - I can never see it. I can only see that they are trying to make
a power-play of some kind.

More to the point, anybody who publicly questions somebody else's motives
simply because they happen to find the person harboring them to be a bit too entertaining,
or too irritating, for their personal taste, is blatantly committing the most famous of them all
- the ad hominem no no -

An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem
(Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man")
consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to
a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than
by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim.
The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted,
and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject.

It is most commonly used to refer specifically to the ad hominem abusive,
or argumentum ad personam, which consists of criticizing or personally attacking
an argument's proponent in an attempt to discredit that argument.

It is also used when an opponent is unable to find fault with an argument,
yet for various reasons, the opponent disagrees with it.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

So I don't know if when

hi cate, you're most probably right. 'geoffrey' is indeed a bit of a wind up merchant and is more than likely enjoying being the centre of all this attention. i retract my earlier statement to let this run forever.let's just leave it dead, enjoy andrew's wonderful lines and leave geoffrey to the mercy of his troubled mind. he really needs to get out more

she had a really serious eye-lash problem. Or if the winkys have
some other explanation. (Although her latest post - Mon Apr 28, 2008 12:21 am -
gives the appearance of somebody caught in a mouse-trap.)

Likewise I don't know if Geoffrey seriously thinks that Andrew's poem
is so bad, morally, for the ears of youth, that its author ought
to voluntarily drink the hemlock.

But what I do know is that all such questions are completely
irrelevant to the serious question that Geoffrey raised:

-- Is Andrew's poem obscene
-- in a sense that Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers isn't?

The Miller test is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression
can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
and can be prohibited.

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case Miller v. California.
It has three parts:

• Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards,
  would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
• Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way,
  sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
• Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political,
  or scientific value.

The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

Of course "obscene" is too strong a word for Andrew's poem in any case.
Which is why I'll use it.

And I'm not sure if that's really Geoffrey's question.
But it is my question.
And, for the sake of argument, I'll take it to be his too.

And in any case Geoffrey (like Lenny Bruce before him)
has been obsessed with this sort of question for far too long
(-going back many years and not just in this thread) for anyone
to seriously doubt that he is serious about it.

To be sure it's a common enough subject for comedians.
Eg George Carlin's "7 dirties words".

But Carlin, like the whole Berkeley free-speech movement before him,
simply badly failed to take into account the distinction between the
use of words, vs the mention of words.

(eg:
-- "Lenny Cohen" has 10 letters. (--mention)
--- Lenny Cohen has broken all 10 commandments. (--use) )

The distinction is crucial in logic.
And logic is very strict about putting quotation marks around words
when they're being mentioned, and not used.

But the distinction is also critical in life, generally, when quotation marks
aren't available. When context, and good faith, have to replace them.

When the context is comedy, then just about anything can be referenced,
all day long, and nobody takes offence.

But for some reason many comedians and poets feel
they need to walk the razor's edge between use and mention.
Geoffrey being a good example.

So that comedians and poets often wind up "going too far".
Which usually means they've blurred beyond redemption
the distinction between use and reference.
Don Imus being a good example.

But we should give them a break.
Because, in truth, comedians and poets
"always live there, - where you and I have only been."


~~~~~~~

The distinction between use and reference
also goes a long way to explain why certain great art is not obscene.

The ultimate redeeming value in things like Beautiful Losers,
and Naked Lunch, and all the other famous cases,
is that they are full of great poetry - images, thoughts, the use of language.
And their ostensible "subjects" are nearly incidental.
Purely vehicles to carry the poetry. As incidental
as the physical book.

I take that to be self-evident.
But in this case Geoffrey goes beyond it.

This time - the first time off hand I've noticed him doing it
- Geoffrey makes a positive assertion as to what is
and what is not obscene -

i was thinking about andrew while laying in the mission hall that night, i was thinking about what i was going to write and i decided to not tell him off no more because he can't help what he is - it's the way he was brought up.. he writes a grubby poem - but the dirt is invisible, inconspicuous. the bit containing the filth he edited out so that the reader has to use imagination and put it back in order to maintain continuation and make sense of it. that's the 'wicked' part. the physical act in andrew's poem is left to one's fantasy - one is encouraged to participate in forming the mucky details. he plants a growing fungus into our minds. i often come across this type of thing in library books (see below). the chapter ends just as the couple are climbing into bed, and the new chapter starts and it's not mentioned no more about it - it's all happened, it's done. the sex is hidden, glossed over. leonard's beautiful losers doesn't do that, it's like he's continued on from all those abrupt endings. his book is like a collection of all the missing bits. andrew cheats us, either through sheer cowardice or an evil desire to coerce his readers into guessing exactly what rotten antics those two selfish buggers happened to get up to. we are supposed to excuse what they did because it is love. love? - don't piss in my wellingtons and tell me my feet sweat. however, one thing is to write about sinful things, another is to make an audience write it themselves in their own minds. andrew is the devil's lackey, he is holding up the bible and telling us that the covers are black for a reason. i say remember the three monkeys. he accuses me of angst, implies that i see everything as good or bad, that my angst-filled little finger never once took the biggest half of the wishbone.

(emphasis - mine)

The fact that Geoffrey dresses it up in a tux, so to speak, should not blind people
to the fact the charge he's making is a serious one. One which it's important
that we think about. And I believe that Geoffrey would prefer that people take
his point, at least, if not his way of saying it, a little more seriously.
And perhaps themselves a little less.

~~

Geoffrey's charge against Andrew is not easy to prove.
And it's all too easy to deny.

(And in that it's just like the charge against Bill Clinton of having made a racist comment
when he compared Obama's victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s.
People with eyes to see could clearly see what he really meant by it.
People without eyes still can't see it.)

~~~

But Geoffrey was wrong when he said -

the bit containing the filth he edited out so that the reader has to use imagination and put it back in order to maintain continuation and make sense of it.

What Geoffrey should have said is -

the bit containing the passion he edited out so that the reader has to use imagination and put it back in order to maintain continuation and make sense of it.

And that's my objection to Andrew's poem. Not its implicit filth.
But it's explicit lack of passion.

That's what makes it obscene.

It's much more like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_c ... eliot.html
than Dr. Zhivago.

By commencing the piece by stating "I'd like to...", it is possible he intends
not to effectuate said heathen fornication. Rather than extending an invitation
of his own, perhaps he is declining a most tantalizing invitation from a lady,
while allowing the lady to maintain her dignity by entertaining with her how
beautiful it could be, although, of course, short-lived. Perhaps he is a man of fine honor.

And then later -

I once suggested that the piece was a turn-down to an invitation from a lady, but in that argument, I intentionally denied the title.

The poem does seem to be a put-down of some sort.

I almost agree, yet I'd invite all to read the original post: to date, there has been no comment on the title.
Maybe I'll post a nice poem with a happy ending. I'm working on it as I type, yet it doesn't appear.
Andrew.
P.S. "64" was never an erotic poem: I've written better than that.

But what's to comment on the title?
It doesn't work, whatever it's supposed to mean.
And it's a lousy idea to pick titles like that,
- unless the thing is supposed to be parody.

And what in the world does it have to do
with anything that's actually in the poem?

The song "When I'm Sixty Four"

..is sung by a young man to his lover, and is about his plans of growing old together with her.
Although the theme is about aging, it was one of the first songs McCartney wrote, when he was sixteen.
Both George Martin and Mark Lewisohn speculated that McCartney may have thought of the song
when recording began for Sgt. Pepper in December 1966 because his father turned 64 earlier that year

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_i%27m_sixty_four

The song "When I'm Sixty Four" "is sung by a young man to his lover,
and is about his plans of growing old together with her."

So "Before You're Sixty-Four" must somehow be contrary to that.

"Before" suggests that one or the other party wants it
(whatever it is) sooner rather than later (or never).
Perhaps, following Manna, it's the lover, not the young man,
making the request for something more real. And this
young man counters it with a description of how cheap
it would actually be. There is a definite aura of put-down.

~~~~~~

A long time ago, in this thread, I quoted canto 5 from Dante's Inferno.
That, however, was my response to Geoffrey's comments,
and not to my own reading of Andrew's poem.
And I was all wrong about it.

Canto 5 is about limbo, and the first and second circles
of Hell, - the ones reserved for the least offensive sinners,
the most forgivable sins. Sins without malice. Namely, passion.
Their punishment -- to be eternally tossed about by whorl-winds,
--- just as they were tossed about by their passions in life.

And that's all wrong for Andrew's poem.
At best his poem deserves circle 3 - for gluttons. ("fried heart attack")

But more, it deserves circle 8, - for fraud
- "panderers, seducers, flatterers, hypocrites, sowers of discord".

And possibly the poem, and Andrew himself, really deserves
the lowest circle of all, for the greatest sin of all: "superbia"
- pride, vanity.

But it really isn't clear what's going on in his poem.

Dear Diane,
The couplet which ends the poem was taken from (inspired by?)
Boris Pasternak; not from one of his poems, but his novel "Doctor Zhivago".
He wrote;
"She was near and dear to him In every feature
As the shores are close to the sea In every breaker."
The novel, sent to the "West", was made into a film starring
the incredibly handsome Omar Sharif and the eminently unbuttonable
Julie Christie.
Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958
(but that's the stuff of another thread).
Diane, that's all for now.
Andrew.
P.S. The girls at my high school fell in love with Omar Sharif,
after watching "Doctor Zhivago".
Knickers in vertical descent; no twisting.
Mind you, that's before I introduced them (well, 2 or 3) to
"The Songs of Leonard Cohen".

So it's an attempt to borrow someone else's passion
and tack it on to the end of his poem. Which makes it a punch line.
Coming at the end, as it does, it serves only to underline
the complete absence of passion that precedes it.
It's much more of a put-down punch-line, than a
classic concluding summary couplet.


ALSO!! -- Julie Christie ---is "eminently unbuttonable" ????
Andrew could not possibly have seen the same Dr Zhivago
that everybody else saw!!!

then gently
unbutton each other; shed
decades of separation.

"Gently"???
--After "decades of separation"?

This poem is full of cognitively dissonant notes like that.


"I'd like to take you to a bed-and-breakfast place not far from town"

--"Not far from town"??? Really tawdry.
How about Rome, Venice, Paris?

"The hours would fly," --- As when you're having fun?

"and when it's late" --- LATE? As in "time for bed - I've got to get up early"?

"we'd share more tales about the boys"

--This is really hard to figure.
The whole situation is hard to fathom,
- but if these two had some kind of relationship in the past,
then they'd be much more likely to reminisce the times
they had together, than to be going through their
separate family photo albums. The trip to Disney land.
Bring out the slides.

"our bodies spoons for Sailing By."

Sailing By is the music played on B.B.C. Radio 4 every night: it accompanies the Shipping Forecast; messages to mariners who listen in, people like me. Then the channel changes to B.B.C. World Service.
Sailing By is the safe, comforting stuff to send you off to sleep.
Try it....it works

"spoons", seem here to mean "sails", to me.
It evokes the old fashioned expression "spooning".

Informal. to show affection or love by kissing and caressing, esp. in an openly sentimental manner.

And for that I consider it the best line in the poem.
And because it's followed by
-- We'd be awake for breakfast:
-- you, fresh fruit with bran flakes,

- where the "spoons" become metallic.

So it has, in the way I read it, a nice awakening
from a dream-like quality about it.

~~~~~~

The poem has an "adult-theme" (whatever it is)
- which always makes "adults" uncomfortable and giggle.
And so they over-compensate, tripping all over themselves,
trying to appear to be urbane. And then they go easier on the poem,
as a poem, then they would if it was about kittens.


~~~~

Not many people refer to Leonard Cohen as their excuse for writing obscenely.
But many people do, explicitly, refer to him as their excuse for proselytize their
idea of religion. And there are some who, mistaking Cohen for a "confessional" poet,
take that as their cue to write their own confessions.

The appeal to Cohen (or Dylan or Waits etc) in all such cases is of course
absurd. What's absent in the imitations, among other things, is, of course,
his level of art. His hard work on it. His life-long devotion to it.
Which is somehow evident to everyone but the imitators.
In any case, they're sad cases. Not really egregious.

[Manna]

I don't mind Greg. I find him highly entertaining. His posts are a joy for me; I laugh all the way through them, though I am glad I am not the one who writes them. I don't think he intends to be taken too seriously, or maybe that is just my hope.

I can laugh at you, therefore you can laugh at yourself. I'm not so special as to be able to do something you cannot.

and several days later,

More to the point, anybody who publicly questions somebody else's motives
simply because they happen to find the person harboring them to be a bit too entertaining,
or too irritating, for their personal taste, is blatantly committing the most famous of them all
- the ad hominem no no -

I could go

but I'd rather point out that this is obviously Greg, trying to discredit my estimation of his to-be-taken-seriousliness. Because I take everything Greg says personally, even when he is not directly addressing me, because I am the center of the universe. And I take everything everyone says personally, except when I don't, which may be just as often. You never can tell.

But my estimation is not without merit, because

-- please forgive me!
I was just goofing off!

People who have been around here a while longer than you have
know better than to pay my posts any mind.
Or at least when I'm in one of these famous turquoise moods of mine.

I wish I knew what a turquoise mood was.

[Sideways]

The goal of this letter is to bring about the demise of Mr. Geoffrey Sideways's heartless vaporings just as Charter 77 brought about the demise of communism in Czechoslovakia. I will start this discussion by arguing that Mr. Sideways apparently can't tell the difference between flirting and sexual harassment, between white lies and perjury, or between a schoolboy carrying a butter knife and carrying a switchblade. Then, I will present evidence that some of the facts I'm about to present may seem shocking. This they certainly are. However, once you understand Mr. Sideways's protests, you have a responsibility to do something about them. To know, to understand, and not to act, is an egregious sin of omission. It is the sin of silence. It is the sin of letting Mr. Sideways suppress controversy and debate.

Ask Mr. Sideways about any of his representatives who shower harebrained, petulant boneheads with undeserved encomia, and the lethargic bottom-feeder will say, "I never meant they should go that far." Yeah, right. The truth is that the hour is late indeed. Fortunately, it's not yet too late to bring the communion of knowledge to all of us. Mr. Sideways, as usual, you prove yourself to be arrogant. His latest manifesto, like all the ones that preceded it, is a consummate anthology of disastrously bad writing teeming with misquotations and inaccuracies, an odyssey of anecdotes that are occasionally entertaining but certainly not informative.

No one can deny that I leave it to more capable and intrepid folks to explore the full ramifications of Mr. Sideways's artifices, yet Mr. Sideways simply regurgitates the empty arguments that have been fed to him over the years. Get that straight, please. Any other thinking is blame-shoving or responsibility-dodging. Furthermore, Mr. Sideways's most progressive idea is to give the most juvenile thieves I've ever seen far more credibility than they deserve. If that sounds progressive to you, you must be facing the wrong way.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Sideways's macabre deeds break down the industrial-technological system. News of this deviousness must spread like wildfire if we are ever to avoid the extremes of a pessimistic naturalism and an optimistic humanism by combining the truths of both. Mr. Sideways has a strategy. His strategy is to revile everything in the most obscene terms and drag it into the filth of the basest possible outlook. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Mr. Sideways.

Ageism can be deadly but Mr. Sideways's personal attacks are much worse. Fortunately, the groundswell of quiet opposition to Mr. Sideways is getting less quiet and more organized. Still, it is easy to see faults in others. But it takes perseverance to investigate the development of corporatism as a concept.

Mr. Sideways's patsies say, "We should be grateful for the precious freedom to be robbed and kicked in the face by such a noble creature as Mr. Sideways." Yes, I'm afraid they really do talk like that. It's the only way for them to conceal that if one dares to criticize even a single tenet of Mr. Sideways's causeries, one is promptly condemned as nasty, unforgiving, clueless, or whatever epithet Mr. Sideways deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation. For the moment, he makes no secret of the fact that he is not only immoral, but amoral.

Oligophrenic, delusional spongers are more susceptible to Mr. Sideways's brainwashing tactics than are any other group. Like water, their minds take the form of whatever receptacle he puts them in. They then lose all recollection that while we do nothing, those who compromise the free and open nature of public discourse are gloating and smirking. And they will keep on gloating and smirking until we pursue virtue and knowledge. I hate it when people get their facts totally wrong. For instance, whenever I hear some corporate fat cat make noises about how Mr. Sideways was chosen by God as the trustee of His wishes and desires, I can't help but think that of particular interest to me is the way that Mr. Sideways continuously denies that his programs of Gleichschaltung are an untrustworthy carnival of plagiarism. For that reason, Mr. Sideways has no discernible talents. The only things he has indeed mastered are biological functions. Well, I suppose Mr. Sideways's also good at convincing people that space aliens are out to lay eggs in our innards or ooze their alien hell-slime all over us, but my point is that Mr. Sideways swears that he is a refined gentleman with the soundest education and morals you can imagine. Clearly, he's living in a world of make-believe, with flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats. Back in the real world, Mr. Sideways has for a long time been arguing that he answers to no one. Had he instead been arguing that you cannot suppose that he would have the slightest compunction about ordering his flunkies to transform fear and its inculcation into the preeminent force ruling human existence, I might cede him his point. As it stands, the leap of faith required to bridge the logical gap in Mr. Sideways's arguments is simply too terrifying for me to contemplate. What I do often contemplate, however, is how the first thing we need to do is to get him to admit that he has a problem. Mr. Sideways should be counseled to recite the following:

I, Geoffrey Sideways, am a deceitful, termagant maniac.
I have been a participant in a giant scheme to reduce human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
I hereby admit my addiction to terrorism. I ask for the strength and wisdom to fight this addiction.
Once Mr. Sideways realizes that he has a problem, maybe then he'll see that he once tried convincing me that he is a spokesman for God. Does he think I was born yesterday? I mean, it seems pretty obvious that Mr. Sideways's sympathizers were recently seen plaguing our minds. That's not a one-time accident or oversight. That's Mr. Sideways's policy.

Last summer, I attempted what I knew would be a hopeless task. I tried to convince Mr. Sideways that his sinister vituperations represent an indissoluble alliance, an intimate alloy, between teetotalism and larrikinism. As I expected, Mr. Sideways was unconvinced.

I used to think that self-centered toughies were the most feckless people on the planet but now I know that there's a chance that Mr. Sideways will leave behind a legacy of perpetual indebtedness in developing countries before the year is over. Well, that's extremely speculative but it is clear today that Mr. Sideways insists that sick, money-grubbing rotters are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. That lie is a transparent and strained effort to keep us from noticing that his maudlin preoccupation with absolutism, usually sicklied over with such nonsense words as "antiprestidigitation", would make sense if a person's honor were determined strictly by his or her ability to force us to tailor our generalizations just to suit his rambunctious whims. As that's not the case, we can conclude only that my position is that there is no time and little temptation for those who work hard on their jobs and their responsibilities to interfere with the most important principles of democracy. Mr. Sideways, in contrast, argues that Pecksniffian mob bosses should be fêted at wine-and-cheese fund-raisers. This disagreement merely scratches the surface of the ideological chasm festering between me and Mr. Sideways. The only rational way to bridge this chasm is for him to admit that there is no such thing as evil in the abstract. It exists only in the evil deeds of evil people like Mr. Sideways.

Mr. Sideways has declared that he's staging a revolt against everyone who dares to urge lawmakers to pass a nonbinding resolution affirming that we'll know soon enough just how ill-natured these kinds of slanderers can be. Mr. Sideways's revolting all right; the very sight of him turns my stomach. All kidding aside, he says that merit is adequately measured by his methods and qualifications. Hey, Mr. Sideways, how about telling us the truth for once? He is out to show a clear lack of respect not just for those brave souls who fought and died for what they believed in but also for you, the readers of this letter. And when we play his game, we become accomplices. All of this once again proves the old saying that Mr. Geoffrey Sideways's handling of the situation has not been a comedy of errors, but a tragedy of errors.