There Wasn't Anything More Tenderly Conductive Than an Orderly's Gloved Fingers

 

    
     "Ben Flesh," Ben Flesh said, extending his hand.

     "Colonel Sanders," the man said grudgingly.

      Ben pushed his hand out farther. The man took it finally and Flesh grabbed the chicken king's hand in both his own and pulled it towards his face. Before Colonel Sanders knew what was happening Flesh opened his jaws wide as he could and shoved as much of the man's hand inside his mouth as possible. He sucked the startled man's knuckles, ran his tongue along his lifeline, chewed his nails, the heel of his hand, tasted his pinky. The Colonel made a fist and fought for his hand, which Ben still held to his mouth.

      "Lemme be. What's wrong with you?"

     And Ben could not have told him, couldn't have said that he'd pulled his first stunt, an engram of character and aggression. He stood before the Colonel with the man's hand still at his lips. "Finger-lickin' good," Flesh said. "It's true. What they say. About Dixie," he added lamely....

     ...Ben looked at him. The man had removed his glasses. He touched a corner of his mustache like a villain in melodrama and, as they all watched, began to peel it back like a Band-Aid of hair.

     "What?" Ben said. "What's this?"

     "I ain't him. I'm not he. I'm Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I own airport limousine services in three states."

     "You're not the chicken prince?"

     "I'm Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa," Roger Foster said.

     "Then what - But why - You look - "

     "Certainly, I look. There's a basic resemblance. I enhance it. I'm a Doppelganger."

     "Does this mean you can't get the franchise, Ben?" Gus-Ira asked.

Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser

• David Harvey on The Future of the Commons:  The violent neoliberal attacks on the rights and power of organized labor that, from Chile to Britain, began in the 1970s are now being augmented by a draconian global austerity plan that, from California to Greece, entails losses in asset values, rights, and entitlements for the mass of the population, coupled with the predatory absorption of hitherto marginalized populations into capitalism’s dynamics. Living on less than $2 a day, this population of more than 2 billion or so is now being taken in by microfinance as the “subprime of all subprime forms of lending,” so as to extract wealth from them — as happened in U.S. housing markets through subprime predatory lending, which was then followed by foreclosures — to gild the McMansions of the rich. The environmental commons are no less threatened, while the proposed answers such as carbon trading and new environmental technologies merely propose that we seek to exit the impasse using the same tools of capital accumulation and speculative market exchange that got us into the difficulties in the first place. Unfortunately, this is an old, old story: every major initiative to solve the problem of global poverty since 1945 has insisted on exclusive use of the means — capital accumulation and market exchange — that produce relative and sometimes absolute poverty. It is unsurprising that the poor are still with us and that their numbers are growing rather than diminishing over time.
• How much is too much?
• Egpyt's class conflict.
• Egypt rising: Potomac power plays.
• Yes you can't.
• Not by process but by outcome.
• But Obama's so dreamy! 
• Speculate.
• Weast's Plan-B. Whatever you do, do not raise property taxes on mcmansionists who send their children to Sidwell Friends.
• My future hell.
• My future hell.

• I'm compelled to note that it is ZERO SURPRISE that United, opening up a deserved revenue stream by introducing a third kit, chose the ugliest, least imaginative option.
• Heh.
• Topological fiction. Just ordered. I haven't read McElroy in a decade. 
• Armantrout reviewed.
• Milton Babbitt has died. I've heard and liked some, but couldn't identify his music in a drop-the-needle contest.
• More Babbitt (and Kayn).
• More Babbitt.
• A Babbitt starter-kit.
• Electric light. 
• UPDATE! It's been a terribly difficult January, so I apologize for bringing you HORRIFYING NEWS!
• Gone sugaring.
• Radio Dept covers The Go-Betweens.
• DIY.
• I hope a friend's Mirah is still a sweepstakes prize. 
• 160 seconds of fun. Loud, yes?
• Breathe the fire.
• I was happy to wake up with this in my head:

THE GOLD STAR

Albert Goldbarth

Elaine's job on the geriatric ward included encouraging
the constipated to loose their stingly, gnarled marbles
into the bowl - by hand: there wasn't anything more tenderly
conductive than an orderly's gloved fingers.
There's nothing redeeming in this: Simply: she
needed the pay, they needed her excavating
(literally: from out/of their cavities) help.
The rest? - "an alien stink that followed me home,
under my toenails, in my hair." But surely we'd do it
willingly for someone we loved... yes? Even
gratefully - for someone we loved. And then
we'd clean the pad, we'd rinse if free of its gobbets
the size and color of cornelian cherries...
gladly, yes? Gladly and changed. Better;
tested. Even when my mother was dying,
shrinking, growing hard rosettes
as if her lungs were tanks in an experiment...
didn't I tend to her? and wasn't it the way
it always used to be? - that with precision instinct
she'd arranged this just so she could prove
to relatives and neighbors that her son
was so caring, her son was the best. I'd wring
the compress, set it on her forehead again.
What a good boy I was!

It's Partly Weariness, and Partly the Fact That I Seem Not to Care Much About the Endings, How Things Work Out, or Whether They Even Do

That teargas canister could have been delivered during any past president's administration. The issue isn't Obama's culpability for contracts already honored in the past (think how many people have been tortured in Egypt at America's behest), the issue is I bet you any # of pints that Egypt, two years into the Obama administration, is still torturing people at America's behest, and I say that because Obama has moved hard right on expanding Executive Power, not only reinforcing the Bush administration's claims of power but demanding more (and then there's that never-ending droning in Afghanistan and yadda...)

I'm considering starting a new blog that would be serious bleggalgazing all the bleggalgazing time, where I can torture that yodel for the killionth time then the killion-first how the insolubility of the problem of power can be observed watching bloggers (consider this post!) fight for power to define the nature of power.

What to name it? I googled an anagram-maker and typed in blackdogred:

Black Dodger
Garbled Dock
Gladder Bock
Gadder Block
Graded Block
Glad Bedrock
Drag Blocked
Grad Blocked
Cab Geld Dork
Back Geld Rod
Back Red Gold
Black Odd Erg
Black Red Dog
Black Red God
Dab Clerk Dog
Dab Clerk God
Dab Cork Geld
Dab Rock Geld
Bad Clerk Dog
Bad Clerk God
Bad Cork Geld
Bad Rock Geld
Bald Dock Erg
Bald Cord Keg
Brad Deck Log
Brad Dock Gel
Brad Dock Leg
Brad Clod Keg
Brad Cold Keg
Drab Deck Log
Drab Dock Gel
Drab Dock Leg
Drab Clod Keg
Drab Cold Keg
Bard Deck Log
Bard Dock Gel
Bard Dock Leg
Bard Clod Keg
Bard Cold Keg
Gab Deck Lord
Gab Clerk Odd
Bag Deck Lord
Bag Clerk Odd
Brag Deck Old
Brag Dock Led
Garb Deck Old
Garb Dock Led
Grab Deck Old
Grab Dock Led
Bark Doc Geld
Bark Cod Geld
Bar Deck Gold
Bar Dock Geld
Bra Deck Gold
Bra Dock Geld
Cad Kerb Gold
Clad Beg Dork
Clad Kerb Dog
Clad Kerb God
Card Bold Keg
Lack Bred Dog
Lack Bred God
Lack Berg Odd
Calk Bred Dog
Calk Bred God
Calk Berg Odd
Rack Bed Gold
Rack Deb Gold
Rack Bled Dog
Rack Bled God
Rack Bod Geld
Add Block Erg
Add Berg Lock
Add Kerb Clog
Add Bog Clerk
Add Gob Clerk
Dad Block Erg
Dad Berg Lock
Dad Kerb Clog
Dad Bog Clerk
Dad Gob Clerk
Gad Beck Lord
Gad Block Red
Gad Bled Cork
Gad Bled Rock
Gad Bred Lock
Gad Bod Clerk
Gad Kerb Clod
Gad Kerb Cold
Glad Beck Rod
Glad Bock Red
Glad Bed Cork
Glad Bed Rock
Glad Deb Cork
Glad Deb Rock
Glad Kerb Doc
Glad Kerb Cod
Glad Orb Deck
Glad Bro Deck
Glad Rob Deck
Drag Beck Old
Drag Block Ed
Drag Bock Led
Drag Bed Lock
Drag Deb Lock
Drag Lob Deck
Grad Beck Old
Grad Block Ed
Grad Bock Led
Grad Bed Lock
Grad Deb Lock
Grad Lob Deck
Dark Cob Geld
Dark Bed Clog
Dark Deb Clog
Dark Bled Cog
Dark Beg Clod
Dark Beg Cold
Lad Berg Dock
Lard Beck Dog
Lard Beck God
Lard Beg Dock
Lard Bog Deck
Lard Gob Deck
Rad Beck Gold
Rad Bock Geld
Rad Glob Deck
Lag Bred Dock
Gal Bred Dock
Gar Bled Dock
Gar Bold Deck
Rag Bled Dock
Rag Bold Deck

Voting closes on Tuesday. Not that the outcome isn't already determined.

• Mathematical proof of cynicism.
• Insultingly bad propaganda.
• Important perspective on the Middle East.
• Good news from the Middle East.
• Agents provocateur.
• Street wise.
• Knowing neither the day or the hour.
• Thoughts on the earthquake.
• Contrast and compare.
• Ring side.
• YFWP.
• Asshole to the end.
• Document the lies (or not).
• Crispy munchkins.
• Dicing Matty Woodchuck.
• Kill switch.
• Tea Party goddess' principles.
• Tea Party and dogs.
• This is fuckingawful:

THE TRANSPARENT MAN

Anthony Hecht

I'm mighty glad to see you, Mrs. Curtis,
And thank you very kindly for this visit--
Especially now when all the others here
Are having holiday visitors, and I feel
A little conspicuous and in the way.
It's mainly because of Thanksgiving.  All these mothers
And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully
And feel they should break up their box of chocolates
For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake.  
What they don't understand and never guess
Is that it's better for me without a family;
It's a great blessing.  Though I mean no harm.
And as for visitors, why, I have you,
All cheerful, brisk and punctual every Sunday,
Like church, even if the aisles smell of phenol.
And you always bring even better gifts than any 
On your book-trolley. Though they mean only good,
Families can become a sort of burden.
I've only got my father, and he won't come,
Poor man, because it would be too much for him.
And for me, too, so it's best the way it is. 
He knows, you see, that I will predecease him,
Which is hard enough.  It would take a callous man
To come and stand around and watch me failing.
(Now don't you fuss; we both know the plain facts.)
But for him it's even harder.  He loved my mother.
They say she looked like me; I suppose she may have.
Or rather, as I grew older I came to look
More and more like she must one time have looked,
And so the prospect for my father now
Of losing me is like having to lose her twice.
I know he frets about me.  Dr. Frazer
Tells me he phones in every single day,
Hoping that things will take a turn for the better.
But with leukemia things don't improve.
It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,
A deep, severe, unseasonable winter,
Burying everything.  The white blood cells
Multiply crazily and storm around,
Out of control.  The chemotherapy
Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.
I know I look a sight, but I don't care.
I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.
It's got so I can't even bring myself
To read through any of your books these days.
It's partly weariness, and partly the fact
That I seem not to care much about the endings,
How things work out, or whether they even do.
What I do instead is sit here by this window
And look out at the trees across the way.
You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you,
It keeps me quite intent and occupied.
Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,
Delicate structures of the sycamores,
The fine articulation of the beeches.
I have sat here for days studying them,
And I have only just begun to see
What it is that they resemble.  One by one,
They stand there like magnificent enlargements
Of the vascular system of the human brain.
I see them there like huge discarnate minds,
Lost in their meditative silences.
The trunks, branches and twigs compose the vessels
That feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts.
So I've assigned them names.  There, near the path,
Is the great brain of Beethoven, and Kepler
Haunts the wide spaces of that mountain ash.
This view, you see, has become my Hall of Fame,
It came to me one day when I remembered 
Mary Beth Finley who used to play with me
When we were girls.  One year her parents gave her
A birthday toy called "The Transparent Man."
It was made of plastic, with different colored organs,
And the circulatory system all mapped out
In rivers of red and blue.  She'd ask me over
And the two of us would sit and study him
Together, and do a powerful lot of giggling.
I figure he's most likely the only man
Either of us would ever get to know
Intimately, because Mary Beth became
A Sister of Mercy when she was old enough.
She must be thirty-one; she was a year 
Older than I, and about four inches taller.
I used to envy both those advantages
Back in those days.  Anyway, I was struck
Right from the start by the sea-weed intricacy,
The fine-haired, silken-threaded filiations
That wove, like Belgian lace, throughout the head.
But this last week it seems I have found myself
Looking beyond, or through, individual trees
At the dense, clustered woodland just behind them,
Where those great, nameless crowds patiently stand.
It's become a sort of complex, ultimate puzzle
And keeps me fascinated.  My eyes are twenty-twenty,
Or used to be, but of course I can't unravel
The tousled snarl of intersecting limbs,
That mackled, cinder grayness.  It's a riddle
Beyond the eye's solution.  Impenetrable.
If there is order in all that anarchy
Of granite mezzotint, that wilderness,
It takes a better eye than mine to see it.
It set me on to wondering how to deal
With such a thickness of particulars,
Deal with it faithfully, you understand,
Without blurring the issue. Of course I know
That within a month the sleeving snows will come
With cold, selective emphases, with massings
And arbitrary contrasts, rendering things
Deceptively simple, thickening the twigs
To frosty veins, bestowing epaulets
And decorations on every birch and aspen.
And the eye, self-satisfied, will be misled,
Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last
It can look forth and comprehend the world.
That's when you have to really watch yourself.
So I hope that you won't think me plain ungrateful
For not selecting one of your fine books,
And I take it very kindly that you came
And sat here and let me rattle on this way.

Kick Over the Wall 'Cause Government's to Fall, How Can You Refuse It? Let Fury Have the Hour, Anger Can Be Power, D'you Know That You Can Use It?

Well motherfucking metaphor, I woke up with this song in my head, this particular live version, and motherfucking Corporate has blocked it's embedding.

Fred Fuckface Hiatt is preemptively blaming the Obama administration for not breaking with Mubarak now:

It's dangerous to assume that the energized and enraged Egyptian populace will be induced to stand down by any promises Mr. Mubarak might make. To question, as Mr. Biden did, whether the protesters' demands are "legitimate" is particularly obtuse. In fact, the leaders of the uprising, including former U.N. nuclear official Mohamed ElBaradei, have set forward a moderate and democratic platform. They seek the lifting of a hated emergency law that outlaws even peaceful political assembly; the right to freely organize political parties; and changes to the constitution to allow free democratic elections. Their platform could transform Egypt, and the Middle East, for the better. But the precondition for change is Mr. Mubarak's departure from office.

Motherfucking Obama, not knowing when to discard a puppet dictator (whose decades of loyal service helped create the crisis). Motherfucking Obama, not knowing when to carrot and stick the next puppet dictator.

Rather than calling on an intransigent ruler to implement "reforms," the administration should be attempting to prepare for the peaceful implementation of the opposition platform. It should be reaching out to Mr. ElBaradei - who Friday night was reported to be under house arrest - and other mainstream opposition leaders. And it should be telling the Egyptian army, with no qualification, that the violent suppression of the uprising will rupture its relationship with the United States. 

Because every Egyptian's first concern is their country's relationship with the US.

Thanks Jack and Randal for the photos.

As They Continue to Populate This Fertile Land with Their Own Bizarre Self-Imaginings

Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true! and BITE ME! just what I needed: the motherfuckers, coming off the shittiest season in team and league history, introduce a third kit, the motherfuckers.

It's every hardcore supporters' dream: the third kit.

D.C. United will unveil its new outfit Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Washington Auto Show at the convention center. (The club is sponsored by Volkswagen, after all.) Several players will model the uniforms at the event and a 15-by-15-foot replica jersey will hang from the convention center lobby for the duration of the week-long show.

The new kit was created by adidas and will prominently feature a VW logo. It's unclear when it will debut during the season. Fans can purchase the jersey for $110 on the club's Web site.

Please note in comments how no one but one (as of 8:00 AM 1/28/11) BDR232 (who only double-posted because YFWP is skeevy) blurted ANY! moral objection.

I don't begrudge United the money, but another stupid romantic illusion shot to hell.

Serendipitously, the storm took our power, and while I want it back a second ago, it wouldn't do me harm to be made to wait until Monday (because while I love you, I'm not coming to library over the weekend just to internet). Meanwhile, this and this:

• It's astonishing how much humans enjoy the Hitler v Stalin debate.
• Bipartisanship pop quiz.
• Egypt.
• Egypt.
• Egypt.
• A profoundly toolish fool.
• Imperialist remedy for Egypt.
• Outside agitators.
• Party time.
• Best false equivalency ever.
• As you'd expect, I'm fixated on this shitty blog being called visually unappealing because Fleabus, but I've evolved to oh the fuck well. 
• Your friends are advertisements. 
• We welcome our new plutocratic overlords.
• (((ACTIVITY))) (1)
• The evolution of style.
• Dispatch from the dangerous kitchen.
• Fuck PEPCO, fuck the Feds.
• Kensington gun shop owner speaks!
• Lit links.
• I had to read Reynolds Price for a course. Meh, but he's not what I like.
• Another round of interpretation.
• Slight returns.
• Woke up with this in my head:

MOTTLED TUESDAY

John Ashbery

Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

Light as Lantern Bones When the Candle Flames

So yesterday at lunch Fiona, whose Kid's Lit class sixteen years ago (I know this precisely because Planet sat in Fiona's lap in her office on Planet's second birthday that semester), after I'd a semester of dismal adult Liberal Studies classes the semester before, changed my mind about dropping out of the program, and who has remained a close friend and dear confidant (and whose advocacy helped me secure scholarships in the English Department for the subsequent MA), told me she has bladder cancer, it's metastisized beyond control, she's a year at most to live.

Canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool, I feel like I've been cheated out of middle age; I played at being young at 49 when my knees didn't ache, I feel like I'm old at 51 now that they do.

• Stupor Man.
• Calling bullshit.
• It's hard to watch.
• Motherfucking cracker.
• Vasectomy nation. 
• In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed are king.
• Holyfuck.
• On the above.
• Panopticon.
• Arrested materialism.
• How billionaires rule our schools. 
• American dreaming.
• The Noble Palestinian?
• Egypt.
• Egypt.
• Hosni Mubarek, your plane is waiting. 
• How fortunate the man with none. 
• UPDATE! BLCKDGRD, misspelled and reviewed: An extremely prolific and slightly bizarre and visually unappealing blog, from an unconventional left-wing perspective. Heh, I agree with any three of four of those at any given time.
• Is the Red Line haunted?
• All you need to know about the Georgetown Metro Stop. And yes, the story that Georgetown residents fought a metro stop is an urban legend.
• Vanderslice covers Atlas Sound.
• Fan club.
• This week's new releases w/MP3.
• In power we trust the love advocated.
• RIP Charlie Louvin.
• More. I know more about his influence than his music, to be honest. 
• UPDATE! Lots of Louvin songs.
• Bunnyrabbits, Satan, cheese, and milk.

NEARING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Pattiann Rogers

Those are my bones rifted
and curled, knees to chin,
among the rocks on the beach,
my hands splayed beneath my skull
in the mud. Those are my rib
bones resting like white sticks
wracked on the bank, laid down,
delivered, rubbed clean
by river and snow.

Ethereal as seedless weeds
in dim sun and frost, I see
my own bones translucent as locust
husks, light as spider bones,
as filled with light as lantern
bones when the candle flames.
And I see my bones, facile,
willing, rolling and clacking,
reveling like broken shells
among themselves in a tumbling surf.

I recognize them, no other's,
raggedly patterned and wrought,
peeled as a skeleton of sycamore
against gray skies, stiff as a fallen
spruce. I watch them floating
at night, identical lake slivers
flush against the same star bones
drifting in scattered pieces above.

Everything I assemble, all
the constructions I have rendered
are the metal and dust of my locked
and storied bones. My bald cranium
shines blind as the moon.

Needs No Handwriting on Its Emptiness

I tease when I threaten to bray here, but I do seek some advice - does anyone know of a program that would allow type in different directions and colors - right-side-up, upside-down, left-to-right, right-to-left, up-to-down, down-to-up, and across different lines, that a lazyfuck techdope can use? Is there a trick in Word I don't know?

No, I didn't watch the speech. I typed that previous sentence three hours before the event. Did he say anything anyone couldn't've predicted he'd say?

Fucking Dukakis in a tank awesome. I recycle a joke in celebration. Also, serendipitously, looking for a paperback copy of Vineland four days ago in a used book store, between Crying and V was the one Ishiguro novel I hadn't read, An Artist of the Floating World, the exact laxative needed for my page 600 blockage of Littell's The Kindly Ones. The view from my carrel:

• Goonstruck: the mysterious mind of modern progressives.
• Snake and stone of spiritual abundance.
• The annual report to shareholders.
• SOTU, so what?
• Circling the jerks.
• Pastor Sanctimonious wrote this Monday.
• The World's Most Sledgehammerable Human wrote this Monday.
• To be fair, E.J. Dionne wrote this Monday.
• To be fair, Eugene Robinson wrote this Monday.
• Parade of pigs.
• Egypt.
• Egypt.
• Ponderosa Parlour.
• Snow. 
• Table games.
• Robbie Keane?
• Novels of the frivolous now. 
• Crises averted.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• NBCC finalists. I've read none of the novels, though Skippy Dies is on my desk. Of the poetry, I can recommend the Carson, the Hayes, and !!!!! C.D. Wright. That said, it's a sillyass award.
• Pumping ugly muscle.
• I don't believe you. 
• Super duper rescue heads.
• Lucinda Williams is 58 today.

ON THE TERRACE

Landis Everson

The lonely breakfast table starts the day,
an adjustment is made to understand
why the other chair is empty. The morning
beautiful and still to be, should woo me. Yet
the appetite is not shared, lost somewhere in memory.

How lucky the horizon is blue and needs
no handwriting on its emptiness. I am
written on thoroughly, a lost novel
found again. I remember the predictable plot too late,
realize the silly, sad urgency of moss.

Dibs

I'm small this way.

Of Course It Was a Disaster

Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?



It's true! and HOLYFUCK! I can't wait for March, but full disclosure: I'm not in Barra or Screaming Eagles. We STAND! behind Eagles (we're almost in that vid at 4 o'clock). I belong to no Supporters Club because I like standing with Mine in 232 and will only join a Supporters Club when Mine no longer have season tickets, which may be motherfucking soon if they don't mail me a motherfucking check.

Gah! arguing the merits of Buzzard Point v Florida Market. I'd vote Florida Market times a hundred, but I'll never get to fuck-me-jig.

O! Here's Benny on my weird obsession with who's the captain:

I don't want to make a big deal out of it. I hope we have more than one leader on this team. I hope we have a bunch of guys who collectively know what to do and we don't have to have one guy. I don't think that is necessary right now. We're trying to build our team right now and be together. I don't think we need to single anyone out at this point. We'll see how this thing evolves. We have plenty of time.

O! I'm told it's almost certain I will be spending ten days in England this late June/early July with Earthgirl, Planet, and Planet's three best friends. It's their high school graduation presents. We're meeting with the other parents this coming Saturday to discuss $$$$ and logistics. Yessiree, I'm going to be responsible for other peoples' eighteen year old daughters in London. Whee!

• Trailing 2-3 in stoppage. Metaphor.
• A man, two cats, a trio of raccoons.
• Political entertainment.
• Monopoly!
• Obama at the edge.
• How not to criticize Obama.
• OH MY FUCKING GOD!
• Where Liberals go to feel good. 
• Shocking. 
• Shocking.
• Knowing and not knowing.
• Bwaha.
• Darning his socks....
• Oxtrot's back!
• The dwindling distance between play and work?
• Or, as Earthgirl would say, the dingling distance.
• Best values in public colleges?
• The Present.
• Derek Walcott? Really?
• Grand booming nonsense.
• Cut and paste culture.
• Garden of earthly delights.
• I've nothing against Pandora, I've just never used it.
• Radio Department.

GOING THERE

Jack Gilbert

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

When the Sun Was Done Muttering, in an Optimistic Way, It Was Time to Leave That There

Perversely, what gives me optimism we might survive as a species is as shitty as we are we haven't killed each other by now:

An Israeli report concerning the country's blockade of the Gaza Strip and a May 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound ship proves Israel is a law-abiding nation, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Sunday.

Remember that, how OUTRAGED! you were.... what? .... whoever the motherfucking coach of the Chicago Bears is should be fired this morning? I don't watch a lot of helmetball, but I used to, I know a little about helmetball, and third string quarterback or no, 1:54 left in Packer territory and what the fuck? Also, metaphor.

• A conversation with Derrick Jensen.
• Free market capitalism!
• A Super Bowl spot for Uncle Sam.
• United we brand.
• Historic amnesia.
• Obviously.
• Jeebusfuckingchrist: On Tuesday, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union address. By any measure, it will be a defining moment. The speech will either usher in the second half of a one term presidency wracked by partisanship and increasingly lambasted by its own base for losing control of the debate to a re-energized conservatism; or it will presage political rebirth, a reconnection with voters, and the beginning of a successful re-election campaign. Yes it won't. No it will.
• Alternative universe. 
• UPDATE! When asshats clash!
• Marco Rubio, ambitious opportunist.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Macaca redux.
• DC's heart of darkness.
• As I type this it's Monday morning rush, the Beltway is closed for a water main break, the Red Line is fucked because of a cracked rail.
• Frederick's most wanted. 
• Currently on Mt Washington.
• I made it 150 pages before quitting.
• Three Heaney poems.
• Iggymoticons.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight. 
• UPDATE! Drive-by shootings.
• Sonic Youth mixtape. 
• I locked the door.
• You'll want to bookmark this.
• Bleached Beach.

THE NEW HIGHER

John Ashbery

You meant more than life to me. I lived through
you not knowing, not knowing I was living.
I learned that you called for me. I came to where
you were living, up a stair. There was no one there.
No one to appreciate me. The legality of it
upset a chair. Many times to celebrate
we were called together and where
we had been there was nothing there,
nothing that is anywhere. We passed obliquely,
leaving no stare. When the sun was done muttering,
in an optimistic way, it was time to leave that there.

Blithely passing in and out of where, blushing shyly
at the tag on the overcoat near the window where
the outside crept away, I put aside the there and now.
Now it was time to stumble anew,
blacking out when time came in the window.
There was not much of it left.
I laughed and put my hands shyly
across your eyes. Can you see now?
Yes I can see I am only in the where
where the blossoming stream takes off, under your window.
Go presently you said. Go from my window.
I am in love with your window I cannot undermine
it, I said.

Rough in the Distant Glitter of the January Sun

Still recovering - it's been a shitty January, first with Earthgirl's illness and then my aunt's death. We got a call yesterday from the batshit nasty daughter of my mother-in-law's batshit nasty and demented husband threatening to put my batshit nasty and demented mother-in-law on a bus in Gainesville FL and ship her to DC (my 89 year old mother-in-law can't fly: she has emphysema and must drag along a oxygen tank which can't be taken on a plane). Plus, regardless of all else, January is always the shittiest month at work as we toggle motherfucking semesters. Still, better moods flicker like mirages on August asphalt streets.

No bleggal hiatus, though hopefully less compulsive aargh, or at least less compulsive arrgh driven by personal arrgh, but probably not. And while the threatened increase in bleggalgazing reeled in the desired effect, for now I'll just giggle and introduce what's now by edict designated Bleggalgazing Anthem 2:

• American exceptionalism.
• Give me your tired, wretched analogies.
• Capitalism.
• The global ruling class. 
• Financial aristocracy. 
• Panopticon. 
• Technophilia v technophobia.
• I must confess, I don't give a flying fuck.
• Bad luck with that.
• Do not give to the United Way. (h/t drip in a comment at a friend's blog.)
• Blooger is still skeevy, so still no rotating Fleabus masthead. I kind of like the look now, which doesn't mean Fleabus won't return both in posts and on masthead once blooger decides it's going to fix its skeeviness.
• DeMarcus Motherfucking Beasley? Gah.
• New libraries. I drive by the new Tenleytown one everyday; it's excellent.
• Somebody in the NYT lists his Top Ten Composers. The dope includes Wagner (though to his credit he includes Bartok.
• One man's opinion on Wagner.

THE SNOW MAN

Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Only By Sucking, Not By Knowing, Can the Subtle Essence Be Conveyed

If asked by a blegchiatriast if I was having thoughts of blegicide I'd have to admit the word hiatus has begun dimly blinking in the back of my mind. It has nothing to do with diminishing readership - despite my best efforts to be more allusive and obscure, readership is up and thank you very much, which only encourages me to become more allusive and obscure: I'm always going to be plagued by the fallout over Eric Clapton's Michelob commercial in the 1970s. There's nothing a not big enough to be a sell-out fears more than selling-out when nobody cares whether he sells-out.

Yes, I've been visiting my closet of avatars, sorting through my crates of tropes and cliches. Everything I say about the clusterfuck I believe though I know my urgency sprints indulgently ahead of the pace of the kaboom. It's fun; you do it too, but it took decades, centuries, to peak, and even if the collapse takes a quarter of that time, it's watching minute hands move on a clock. It's not a bang or a whimper but a sigh and a grind and Friday afternoon meetings to argue semantics and assign blame.

Thank Lord Etcheverry opening day is two months away because I need to argue semantics and assign blame face-to-face and laughing about a representative but funnier clusterfuck. As for Blegsylvania, we're all geriatric Rotary Club members now.

As for hiatus, no, but compulsion's gotta stop, though I bet a pint it won't.

• Smarter protectionist demagogues, please.
• Battling little republics in a collapsing empire.
• Liberaltarianism lives.
• Necroprofit.
• Mosquitos doing the furious work of fate.
• Feeling aphoristic.
• What is a good life?
• A frothy mix of lube and fecal matter. 
• A frothy mix of lube and fecal matter. 
• Good news. 
• Re: the header - first time since moving to blooger it's been this skeevy.
• 20th Century poetry.
• Critics criticized on criticizing criticism.
• The philosophical novel.
• The sky is falling.
• Gyroscope.
• Island music.
• UPDATE! C.R.E.E.P.
• Jesusfuck, the motherfucking Decemberists suck. 
• UPDATE! Ubu Dance Party!
• Back and forth.
• Dismemberment Plan reuniting!
• Girl O'Clock.
• Wanna hear more new Robert Pollard? Shazam, go halfway down the playlist.

IMPROVISATION ON LINES BY ISAAC THE BLIND

Peter Cole

Only by sucking, not by knowing, 
can the subtle essence be conveyed—
sap of the word and the world's flowing 

that raises the scent of the almond blossoming, 
and yellows the bulbul in the olive's jade. 
Only by sucking, not by knowing. 

The grass and oxalis by the pines growing 
are luminous in us—petal and blade—
as sap of the word and the world's flowing; 

a flicker rising from embers glowing;
light trapped in the tree's sweet braid 
of what it was sucking. Not by knowing 

is the amber honey of persimmon drawn in. 
An anemone piercing the clover persuades me—
sap of the word and the world is flowing 

across separation, through wisdom's bestowing, 
and in that persuasion choices are made: 
But only by sucking, not by knowing 
that sap of the word through the world is flowing.

Although Still Trapped in the Millennium I Knew I Had Still Time to Blow Some Kisses

Lookit, I like the trap whose tripped latch I voluntarily spring on my complicitous ass each night before I go to sleep. I am a happy fat white middle-aged monogamously married heterosexual making an lower-upper middle class income with three years left on my mortgage and five years left before my pension is fully vested.





How's that for gratuitous! I like playing at apocalyptic poet in Necropolis, Blegsylvania (I'm going to be unable to resist writing about the ghost-towning of Blegsylvania, yo), but my genuine aargh is that the trap whose tripped latch I voluntary spring on my complicitous ass each night before I go to sleep will not be offered as standard for my daughter's and her kids' generations, and one aim of this shitty blog is documenting the deliberate and calculated dismantlement of that trap.

Jeebus, touch me in the right place at the right time. That would be nice.

• I'm number one.
• Talking with Hobsbawm. One project I hope to begin (if not finish) in 2011 is rereading Hobsbawm's four Ages.
• Pettiness in academia. There's irony here.
• Anticommunism, white supremacy, southern capital accumulation. 
• Mobamafucker. 
• Mobamafucker has stomach parasites!
• Why does Roger Ailes hate America?
• Hoax.
• Just a speech away.
• Joe Blows. 
• Wouldn't bet against it. 
• Jack, what's up?
• Suicide invoice. 
• Blogging advice!
• Fuck-me-jig.
• On the above.
• O'Malley 2016? 
• CCT! And fuck King Farm.
• Whatever you do, don't raise property taxes on fucking mcmansionists.  
• We're #1.
• We're #1.
• Silliman's awesome litlinks.
• Berryman.

NO PALMS

Dorothea Tanning

No palms dolled up the tedium, no breathing wind.
No problem was the buzzword then, their way to go.

In truth, my case was black as sin, a thing to hide,
In that they feigned to find me sane, so not to know.

Someone brought in a medium. Anathema!
Some clown sewed up my eyes, he said it wouldn't show.

Confusing hands with craze, they howled, "Let's cut them off."
Confusing, too, their spies, my lies without an echo.

Time and again they stitched my mind with warp and woof.
Time pounded in my ruby heart, doing a slow,

Slow dim-out in that lupanar, slow take, slow fade,
Slow yawning like a door. "Hello," I said. "HELLO."

There, flung across the room between inside and out,
There must have shown itself to me. . .an afterglow.

With such a blaze to celebrate where centuries meet 
With time itself, how could I hesitate? Although

Still trapped in the millennium I knew I had 
Still time to blow some kisses. Look up, there they go!

Oaths and Other Forms of Blackmail Are Destructive to the Free Working of Man's Intellect

Blogpal Richard linked to this Feral Scholar post:

Jared Loughner may have some problems with dissociation, however that is being defined, but he didn’t learn to load and fire a Glock 19 via some synaptic disruption in his cerebral cortex; he learned it from a culture. Last I checked, there is no evidence of a Glock 19 gene, though I expect the DSM-IV people to come up with a Glock 19 Disorder soon enough, and Searle will invent a drug to control it.

This may sound like I’m trying to make the US case against him, given the narrow legal definition of insanity; but I’m not. The legal definition of anything is always inadequate, because law can never anticipate the complexity of context.

The case I’m making is that Loughner – in his own mentally fractured way – was behaving exactly the way his culture demonstrated he was supposed to behave.

I blithely commented, so am I, and I mean that cynically but I mean it sympathetically: even if you obstinately resist power to your ornery best your orneriness obstinately continues to water power's avatars. Children, shush and hurry past the house of the crazy hippie with the feral cats and garden statuary (and who probably makes the same sillyass Star Trek allusions over and over...).

• Society of the spectacle.
• Panopticon.
• Implosion. 
• Blindspots and fear of the working class. 
• Peoples Republic of Crony Capitalism.
• Left? What Left? (part two).
• Portraits from a job-starved city.
• Enough is enough. 
• Let them drift away.
• Just don't raise property taxes on the fucking mcmansionists.
• Fuck the Smithsonian.
• Virginia crackers.
• Glenmont!
• More new inhabitants in the blogrolls. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, send me an email.  
• I've never been able to read Henry James for fun. 
• RIP Don Kirshner. 
• PJ HARVEY! 
• UPDATE! PJ HARVEY!
• Worlds in collision.
• The last Albums of 2010 (part eight). Hey, WFMU just played a Noveller song (Bleached Beach) and kaboom!
• Classical music as synchronicitous soup.
• Janis Joplin was born 68 years ago today.
• Largehearted's generosity.
• The fevered dreams of Hernando deSoto.
• UPDATE! Despicable dogs!
• Specials allusion.
• Woke up with this in my head.
• Speaking of old gags:

[RESPONSE TO THE LOYALTY OATH]

Jack Spicer

 We, the Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants of the University of California, wish to register our protest against the new loyalty oath for the following reasons.

1) The testing of a University faculty by oath is a stupid and insulting procedure. If this oath is to have the effect of eliminating Communists from the faculty, we might as logically eliminate murderers from the faculty by forcing every faculty member to sign an oath saying that he has never committed murder.

2) That such an oath is more dangerous to the liberties of the community than any number of active Communists should be obvious to any student of history. Liberty and democracy are more often overthrown by fear than by stealth. Only countries such as Russia or Spain have institutions so weak and unhealthy that they must be protected by terror.

3) Oaths and other forms of blackmail are destructive to the free working of man's intellect. Since the early Middle Ages universities have zealously guarded their intellectual freedom and have made use of its power to help create the world we know today. The oath that Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to swear is but a distant cousin to the oath we are asked to swear today, but both represent the struggle of the blind and powerful against the minds of free men.

   We, who will inherit the branches of learning that one thousand years of free universities have helped to generate, are not Communists and dislike the oath for the same reason we dislike Communism. Both breed stupidity and indignity; both threaten our personal and intellectual freedom.