Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Trolling and Trawling and Crawfishing and Crabbing





I'm keeping the name of the blog and will still byline and comment as BDR, but in the space of thirty seconds yesterday I decided to type in my name (it's weird, I'm hesitant this time) - Jeff Popovich - just before a half-hour appointment I couldn't avoid so to prevent me from changing my mind in the minutes before someone might read it. Beyond my prime explanation yesterday (that I'm nobody, that no one gives a shit, if I was someone of interest I would have many more readers witnessing me digitally self-incriminate myself shamelessly here, there, everywhere, and Corporate knows how to find me if its bots register word algorithms here that signal me as a threat), the immediate catalyst was the discovery that someone I dearly love who is much shier and much more private than me posts her art and signs her name, if she can, I can, I impulsively thought. I'd been thinking about this for months. I'm still working out the other reasons: they remain fascinatingly mysterious to me, multi-faceted, both ambitious and cowardly, I'll get back to you or not, you only think you get autobiography here, you've no idea how much I'd need give to explain. What this is not: it is not a call for others to end their anonymity nor an assertion of moral bravery on my part vis a vis anyone else. As with everything here, there, and everywhere, it's all about me. It had nothing to do with anyone who reads or links to or blogrolls this blog though it did have something to do with the stupid King of Anarchist contests raging since the infinitesimal paradigm shift: now that some on the professional left have moved towards obamapostasy it's vital for some - me included, of course - to remain lefter than thou. Yes, it has to do with what I do with this shitty blog. Yes, I realize this is only interesting to me. Plus, if someone gets what I did yesterday with the reveal and echoing Wright opening line, they'll know my name for a second then forget both the name and the gag.












MAP

Atsuro Riley

Daddy goes.
         Trolling and trawling and crawfishing and crabbing and bass-boating and trestle-jumping bare into rust-brackish water and cane-poling for bream and shallow-gigging too with a nail-pointy broomstick and creek-shrimping and cooler-dragging and coon-chasing and dove-dogging and duck-bagging and squirrel-tailing and tail-hankering and hard-cranking and -shifting and backfiring like a gun in his tittie-tan El Camino and parking it at The House of Ham and Dawn's Busy Hands and Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing double-wide and spine-leaning Vicki against her WIDE-GLIDE Pontiac and pumping for pay at Ray Wade's Esso and snuff-dipping and plug-sucking and tar-weeping pore-wise and LuckyStrike-smoking and Kool only sometimes and penny-pitching and dog-racing and bet-losing cocksuckmotherfuck and pool-shooting and bottle-shooting over behind Tas-T-O's Donuts and shootin' the shit and chewin' the fat and just jawin' who asked you and blank-blinking quick back at me and whose young are you no-how and hounddog-digging buried half-pints from the woods.  


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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Nights Electrocute My Fugitive



  • Was looking for the photo for the gag below, found that Planet photo of Fleabus in the same folder.  Fleabus, my favorite cat ever, she's eight now, she's still astonishing, this photo is six, seven years old, she still smiles like that, is fatter now like you and you and me. I've asked Planet for new Fleabus photos, we'll see.
  • While I like the MomCat banner on the page, it's actually the MomCat Signal activated - see, it says so up there: since she crawled into my lap Friday night no one has seen her. Fine metaphors abounding are not always - are as often enough not - a good thing.
  • Today's monologue is actually yesterday's theme song. I couldn't wait.
  • My name, by the way, is Jeff Popovich - you could have found out if you'd wanted, I'd dropped enough clues, and you could have asked and I'd told you - and I'm nobody. The anonymity was never to hide but to signify.
  • Let me get this out of the way: Ratfucking Obama, ratfucking Obama, ratfucking Obama, that's it until the next new level of the ratfucking you know Obama's enjoying. But.... Cuccinelli!
  • Who has a running mate who couldn't more please Democratic Party central scripting, funny that.
  • Eugene Robinson's obamapostasy will never be ready.
  • Democracy can be rejuvenated?
  • Burbocentrism.
  • New Inquiry's Sunday links.
  • BRT!
  • MOCO fail.
  • I want to thank the Washington Nationals for reminding me not to give a fuck about them.
  • Mal de coucou.
  • Four foolproof ways to become a famous novelist.
  • Likeable monsters.
  • Calvino, for those of you who do.
  • The health of poetry.
  • Moment.
  • Previously unheard Psycho Killer.
  • We saw the new Star Trek movie Friday night, Indian food then movie with Earthgirl and Planet. I haven't seen the first one so I'm unclear and unconcerned about the timeline shift thingee re: millions upon millions of dollars on production to get to the reverse scene I'll not spoil here, but here's my takeaway: they spent millions and millions of dollars to get to the Bone's I'm a doctor, dammit, not a torpedo mechanic line, plus this was seed-bedding the product line.
  • I swore off stupid-ass Star Trek allusions when professional progressive Yglesias lectured me on Star Trek, not Star Trek itself, and why should I let a motherfucking professional progressive keep me from posting stupid-ass Star Trek allusions I was asked, it won't forever, I said, in fact I give up now.





AT THE EXECUTED MURDERER'S GRAVE

James Wright

1

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born   
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,   
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave   
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.   
He tried to teach me kindness. I return   
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,   
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,   
Had I not run away before my time.   
Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,   
His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best   
Of all the arts men learn in a dead place.   
I walked here once. I made my loud display,   
Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice.   
Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past.   
I add my easy grievance to the rest:

   2

Doty, if I confess I do not love you,
Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.   
The nights electrocute my fugitive,
My mind. I run like the bewildered mad   
At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,
Arch and cunning, under the maple trees,   
Pleased to be playing guilty after dark.
Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies.
Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead.   
I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.

   3

Idiot, he demanded love from girls,   
And murdered one. Also, he was a thief.   
He left two women, and a ghost with child.   
The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head,   
Made such revolting Ohio animals   
Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief.   
I waste no pity on the dead that stink,
And no love’s lost between me and the crying   
Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police   
Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.   
Christ may restore them whole, for all of me.   
Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who   
Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago   
Can do without my widely printed sighing   
Over their pains with paid sincerity.   
I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.

   4

I pity myself, because a man is dead.
If Belmont County killed him, what of me?   
His victims never loved him. Why should we?   
And yet, nobody had to kill him either.   
It does no good to woo the grass, to veil
The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.   
Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.   
I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

   5

This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,   
When all are caught with what they had to do   
In fear of love, when every man stands still   
By the last sea,
And the princes of the sea come down
To lay away their robes, to judge the earth
And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,   
And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal—
Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,   
My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.

   6

Staring politely, they will not mark my face   
From any murderer’s, buried in this place.   
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.

   7

Doty, the rapist and the murderer,   
Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;   
And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace,   
Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I.   
Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.   
Earth is a door I cannot even face.   
Order be damned, I do not want to die,   
Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.
The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.   
(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)   
I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,   
Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.   
Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face   
Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:   
Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.


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Monday, May 20, 2013

Me, or: Theme Song 5/20/13 8:54 PM EDT

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Sunday, May 19, 2013

For Me It Was Getting Late; for You, Where You Were, Not













ALONE FOR A WEEK

Jane Kenyon

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went to town
and busied myself all day.
The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.
The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical....


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Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Warmth, the Gloom, the Smell of Sweeping Compound Clinging to the Broom Soothed Me





Some requests honored in lieu of daily auto-ecstatic bilge-pumping and scab-scraping, two days in a row this, I dig but not enough yet - I would have titled this post the last line of the poem below but can't honestly. Birthday girl B requests the Cheap Trick, P reminds me that Joey Ramone was born sixty-two (62!) years ago tomorrow, asks me to play what I always play on his birthday, anne requested the Fennesz, three people sent word they loved yesterday's Jane Kenyon poem, two asking for more, so, I've an extra copy of her collected first come first served send an email if you want it.






TROUBLE WITH MATH IN A ONE ROOM COUNTRY SCHOOL

Jane Kenyon

The others bent their heads and started in.
Confused, I asked my neighbor
to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl
who brought raw milk to school from her family’s
herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,
and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,
holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.
Ann understood division. . . .

Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk
and led me roughly through the class
without a word. My shame was radical
as she propelled me past the cloakroom
to the furnace closet, where only the boys
were put, only the older ones at that.
The door swung briskly shut.

The warmth, the gloom, the smell
of sweeping compound clinging to the broom
soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it
upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.
I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew
from my piano lessons. . . .
and hardened my heart against authority.
And then I heard her steps, her fingers
on the latch. She led me, blinking
and changed, back to the class



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