12,447. RUDIMENTS, pt. 925

RUDIMENTS, pt. 925

('my friend frank, the telephone pole')

It's funny now to read old

writings, American stuff,

about the recent decades.

Most of it was approached

all wrong. But people then,

at the times of the writing,

proclaimed it right and

strongly so. I had an English

teacher once, way back at

the end of high school, who

was always going on about

'Growing Up Absurd,' by

Paul Goodman. I never

knew what was in her head,

because it wasn't the sort

of book kids going through

the experiences and phases

he was writing about (mostly

wrongly) would care about

reading. It was a book about

all that but written - instead  -

for vengeful adults. Meaning,

by that, adults who probably

were angry that they were not

going through all that themselves
and being young again. It's a good
read, don't get me wrong, and
some of it now reads as funny too.

Paul Goodman, in addition, was

a predatory gay man  - from all

I've read about him, carefully,

since  -  whose every move was

about a move, on someone of

the male persuasion. People at

parties and things actually would

avoid him. He had a nice, broad,

1950's axe to grind and by means

of this book, he ground it. So,

taking that book too seriously

was a wrong thing to do. The

teacher's name was Sylvia Oettle,

pronounced like 'Ootley.' Like

Tetley in the tea company name,

but Ootley.

-

I read it, and discussed it with her;

but it was a boring, gruesome read.

Her explications of it helped nothing.

The subject matter, and the concerns

of its moment, kept the book very

grounded in its then-present day, all

of which now is a long-past, for us.

Hind-sight, they say, is often 20/20,

but this book was way off. Goodman

uses the premise of the book to step

off and go on about things that irked

him : beatniks, hipsters, drop-outs,

corporations, social culture, and more.

You name it, he touched (upon) it.

The funny thing is, in this book, you

could read it cover to cover, twice

and back and forth too, and come

away with the idea that females

didn't exist, he just has no concept

of a female in the book; everything

is boys and young men. It's hard

to imagine what I'm saying unless

you dose it yourself and see.

-

Anyway, besides being pesky, she

always mixed me up with her sort of

gung-ho, over-the-top, attitude about

everything SHE found cool. I guess

she too wanted to be young; and in

that pushy, Jewish school-marmy

forceful way, she imposed all sorts

of things no one was supposed to

mind because it was HER pushing

it. As if she had clearance to do

anything she wanted, and no one

else did. I kept as far away from

her and her little cabal of 'prime

students' as I could. She had a

real bunch of ass-kissers always

following her around too. The

biggest thing for them, and her,

was to go, as a group, to things

as fancy little mid-60's hip films,

like Georgy Girl, and Morgan, and

The Graduate, and the come back

and talk about how great and how

enlightening it all was  -  as if that

was English. What a dumb subject.

I've always hated the manipulation

of movies, and they could see none

of that  - the entire bunch of them

was blind to what was happening.

That whole film thing anyway is

just more of the same Jewish crap,

writ large, that takes over people's

fake lives. Films and movie-making
have no place in real life. When you
carefully look at what's going on
with that, you can see it's all a
degenerative monster-cracker that
sucks the air from normal life. It's
a linear, modern draft of a second
revision of Reality, and people
are being take by it. In so many
ways the vapid concept of
'entertainment'  -  simple and
boastful and useless, is taken
over and is-used for propaganda.
Negativity. Breakdown. Callousness.
Once that enters the system, pure
mythology takes over. Prideful
modern man has no qualms about
laughing at the Gods of old, the
two-headed monsters and griffins
of Olympia, the landings and presences
of Gods and kings from other realms,
but they'll slavishly lick at the
lollipop of sick and fantasmagorical
Evil and Destruction, and buy into it
all, if it's presented to them as stupid
popcorn entertainment.
-

Oettle's brother, by the way, was Arthur

Sills, at that time the Attorney General

of the State of New Jersey. Big deal too.

That's like a big, fat, fancy-ass lawyer

for the Government, sucking taxpayroll

money for much of nothing except the

reinforcing of State stuff they already

want and have implemented. It's

an insider's game, for sure. He lived

in Metuchen. That would have made

her, his sister, as a kid, Sylvia Sills.

Which I thought was pretty funny.

She would have been better off

opening a window store : Sylvia

Sills Sells Sills, Inc.
-
It got really tiresome, by the end of
the term, to have to put up with her
effrontery. Then she'd started calling
my mother, at home, going on about
my obstinate refusal to adhere to my
potential, go with the program, etc. It
didn't take much more than a breeze
and a whisper to convince my mother
of something  -  all it had to do was
look or sound the least bit 'official'  -
and she was then off and running
about my violating standard
schoolboy ethics. Baloney for lunch,
and baloney for dinner too. The
final straw was, whenever it was
exactly, there was a 'teacher's
strike' in the school district  -  one
that lasted a few weeks. Mrs. Oettle
decided to hold those whiz-bang 
classes, English, the selected kids, 
at her home. She told or asked me
to come too, but I said 'No.' Which 
kind of annoyed her, but I said
'If you guys can strike over 'money'
issues, it seems to me that your
big-deal 'Teaching' ideals are full
of nothing at all.' Right after that
her and some other student stole my
poem, which I had been withholding
from the 'Literary' yearbook, and
published it anyway ('Friends Of the
World'), plus had given it over to some
jerk art-student illustrator  -  which
resulted as well in a hideously
illustrated selection. There was
just nothing ever good there.
My own, secondary, title to this
piece of adolescent drivel, was
'My Friend Frank, the Telephone
Pole,' but they didn't use that.
I should have called it
Death By Osmosis.'