Actually, Marx Is Jealous

Stretched out and face down on my bed with my laptop before me, perusing a capsule description of the Santa Fe Institute's "zero-intelligence method" of analyzing financial markets (sounds kinda like pointless topology), I saw in the periphery of my perceptual world a nasty little spider. Without thinking much, I picked up a collection of Marx's later political writings and bashed the critter to death (I hope). I was reminded of a couplet from the Coup song "Not Yet Free," from the album Kill My Landlord: "Capitalism is like a spider / The web is getting tighter..."

This arthopod encounter came hot on the heels of another incident, in which I slew a moth that had settled upside-down on my ceiling with the mighty heft of the (two-volume, slipcase-enclosed) Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.

There should be a whole archive of such literary collisions. Consider: as Francis Wheen's delightful Karl Marx: A Life informs us (on p. 109), though "[Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon [the socialist/anarchist] made no public riposte to [Marx's] The Poverty of Philosophy [which was in part a polemical attack on Proudhon]...his own copy has furious marginal scribbles on almost every page -- 'Absurd', 'A lie', 'Prattle', 'Plagiarism', 'Brazen slander' and 'Actually, Marx is jealous'. An entry in one of his notebooks describes Marx as 'the tapeworm of socialism'." If we know that Proudhon called Marx a plagiarist and a tapeworm in his private writings, why can't we figure out what tomes the Frenchman used to kill real worms? Or other creeping things. I'm not picky. I'm sure the CSI creative team could crank out at least an episode or two riffing on this premise. "The copy of The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Criticism left at the crime scene doesn't have any fingerprints on it, but I did find this strange brown spot. It's probably nothing, but..." "Enhance! Enhance!" "Whoa! Looks like DNA from a false stag beetle, chief. But those are found only in California!" And the hunt is (would be) on.

(The worst thing about all this is that I now have to live the rest of my life with the absolute certainty that bugs do sometimes end up on my bed. I've long suffered from the (not uncommon, I don't think) fear that, when I sleep, bugs crawl all over my face; I've managed to carry on largely on the basis of the irrational but never (until now) disproven belief that my fear was totally unfounded.)

(In the past few minutes alone, I've been greatly startled by things that turned out to be 1) my comforter (ironically) and 2) my headphones. Help.)