Friday, May 20, 2011

By Way of Demonstration, He Moves Mechanically Side to Side While Making a Clicking Noise

D brought along his friend K, the one who likes to ask me about blegging, to Thursday Night Pints right when I've a bad case of bleggal frakes.* Serendipity likes to fuck with me and when it fucks with me it fucks with you.

Why do you think, what did you call it, "Blegsylvania" is dying, she asked. It's that fucking new Kate Bush release, I said, I can't get past how spiritually crushing it is, it's what I would feel like if someone newly colorized the first year of Emma Peel Avengers only worse because Kate Bush did it to herself. What the fuck are you talking about, she said, winning last night's round of ridiculously priced scotch.

Well, we just wrote tomorrow's post, I said, and I'm forbidden to bleggalgaze beyond this line, but Blegsylvania isn't dying, it's just a Wednesday afternoon more often than a Saturday morning just like everything else we supposedly do for fun.











  • The way up is the way down.
  • *If any of the three of you who got the Harington care to explain what the frakes are in comments, I'd be obliged. No? That's cool too.
  • I have spent many a content hour with Frank Kermode: The manifest sense is the literal one we all grasp; the latent sense is the spiritual meaning, the secret that must be revealed by interpretation. This is true on the simplest level; there is naturally no point to an interpretation that tells us only what we all know already, what inescapably and instantly strikes the eye. An interpretation must either uncover or create a secret. For Kermode, the very existence of a text inspires interpretation, and therefore engenders secrecy.
  • Silliman's always generous litlinks.
  • More on Roth's Booker: "He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".
  • Fools want noise.
  • Any list that makes Magnetic Fields number 97 and motherfucking Nirvana (the Raymond Carver of bands) number one is bullshit.
  • Black country.
  • Subways.





YOU KNOW

Mary Joe Bang

You know, don't you, what we're doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless. 

We're watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, "I knew, 

even as a child, that my mind was adding color 
to the moment." 

The one in red says, "In the dream, there was a child 
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting

that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion."

By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically 
side to side while making a clicking noise. 

His friends look away. They all know 
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch 

because we have nothing better to do. 
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd

will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, 

three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound 
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss 

with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this. 
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.



8 comments:

  1. I would, but I haven't read the Harington yet.

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  2. And the same subject is WANKING!

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  3. My apologies for being pushy. I've just finished up all the Latha-centric ones and am about to start Enduring, Harington's last Stay More novel, and I just feel like yapping about them.

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  4. Ianian!

    Bloggers age, thus, slowdown, thus, death. All the young'ns on Facebook? My kids are un-internets-y save for weird crap on YouTube, so I have no idea.

    It's a RS list, thus by definition bullshit.

    Runaway goat's a new one. Usually it's a chemical spill.

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  5. I'm loving the Planet art work!

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  6. Heh, (a) it's a blog and (b) I didn't invite her and (c) believe me, I did you a Kind and spared you much worse. It was actually a good conversation.

    Zen, more tomorrow!

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  7. Hahaha, jeez, you're not pushy...

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  8. Bloggers age, thus, slowdown, thus, death.

    Hey, I put up a post today! Therefore, not quite dead yet. Will blooger still work after tomorrow when we're all burning in the lake of fire?
    ~

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