Monday, February 28, 2011

Our Address Books For So Long a Slow Scramble Now Are Palimpsests

Because I'm a lazy fuck who nonetheless wants to give me and mine dance, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sub out all underlined names, proper nouns, and select nouns in this Guardian review of yesterday's Carling Cup final between Arsenal and Birmingham City with whatever names and nouns you need to complete an allegory for the current zeitgeist and your Weltenschauung as of today.

At the final whistle Arsenal's players stood, sat or knelt on the lush emerald turf like figures in a tableau of despair. Motionless, traumatised, suddenly drained of the last vestiges of belief and hope and even pride, they looked dismayingly like Bayern Munich after Manchester United had finished with the German side at the Camp Nou in 1999.

Jack Wilshere hit the crossbar here and Robin van Persie was the author of one of the most beautiful goals ever scored in a Wembley final – surely, at least, the best ever scored by a player on the losing side – but Tomas Rosicky's bungled attempt to backheel a clear chance into the net with 10 minutes left somehow epitomised Arsenal's display on an evening when they failed in the attempt to win their first trophy since 2005.

So stunning was the defeat that they will find it difficult to recover their morale, although the press of events in the Premier League and the European Cup over the coming weeks may serve to take their minds off a disastrous day. Pointing to the enforced absence of Cesc Fábregas, Thomas Vermaelen and Theo Walcott will not help. A club with Arsenal's ambitions and resources – they have 19 players out on loan – should have acquired the capacity to ride such misfortunes.

On paper, this was a mismatch: thoroughbreds versus mongrels. Of such contrasts are cup classics made, and in the eyes of more than one neutral the two sides produced arguably the best football match yet seen at the new Wembley. To make it so, the occasion required not just Birmingham City's honest effort, dogged persistence and resilient structure but Arsenal's insecurity and anxiety, a neurosis born of the weight of the expectation, conscious or otherwise, that they would ease their way to victory by virtue of their superior class.

It would not be too harsh to suggest that Arsenal got exactly what they and their manager deserved for a performance that began with the most blatant piece of undeserved good fortune, contained enough individual mistakes to fill an entire season and ended with the sort of defending that a team produces when not enough attention is paid to constructing a side equally strong and self-confident in all areas.

There is no due date. Failure to turn in a paper will not reduce final grade, nor will turning in a paper increase it.







IN VIEW OF THE FACT

A.R. Ammons

The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know
what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on
the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll
drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every
single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength
and getting more precious all the way. . . .


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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Woke Up with This Set in My Head













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Saturday, February 26, 2011

Sad Dogs Are Tied Afar

These inane articles exist solely to bait fucks like me:
What is literary fiction? It is not genre fiction. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a historical novel. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, the leading British prize for science fiction. Yet you only have to think about these two examples to see how they escape their genres. Mantel's novel revisits the favourite stamping ground of historical fiction – Henry VIII and his wives – in order to rethink what it might be to see events filtered through the consciousness of a person from a distant age. Ishiguro takes a dystopian hypothesis – human clones being bred for their organs – and then declines to put in place any of the sci-fi framework that would allow us to understand how this could be. Indeed, the whole interest of his story is in the limits placed upon its narrator. These are both "literary" novels because they ask us to attend to the manner of their telling. And, despite their narrative demands, they have both found hundreds of thousands of readers willing to do so.
Well doublefuck me, aren't those two of my desert island five living novelists?

The mega-Borders a mile from home is closing shop and EVERYTHING MUST GO! so we're doing a raid later today or Sunday morning. I'm not in a hurry: I'm certain the novels on the fiction wall I'd be interested to snag at 50% off will be there tomorrow, such a "literary fiction" snob am I. Still, I'm trying to crawl out of Littell's The Kindly Ones. At the suggestion of Jim I tried Canetti's Auto da Fe, and - apologies Jim - it's fuckawful: I've given it three tries, made it thirty whole pages, and no - so I won't be buying that, but any and all suggestions are welcome, including golden oldies.

UPDATE!




Blessed serendipity, look what I had picked off my bookshelf half-an-hour before friend drip suggested I read it. And you have every right to suggest: I asked!







GHAZAL OF THE BETTER-UNBEGUN

Heather McHugh
A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran
Too volatile, am I?  too voluble?  too much a word-person?
I blame the soup:  I'm a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's:  sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person.

The only cure for birth one doesn't love to contemplate.
Better to be an unsung song, an unoc-
curred person.

McHugh, you'll be the death of me -- each self and second studied!
Addressing you like this, I'm halfway to the
third person.


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Friday, February 25, 2011

Egoslavia's Holiest Day




George was born sixty-eight years ago today. I love George. I can say with utter certainty that I have listened to All Things Must Pass more than any other album. In that sillyass desert island game, it's one of five.

Ric Flair is 62 today:




His shoes cost more than your house.







TWO, THREE

Rae Armantrout

Sad, fat boy in pirate hat.
Long, old, dented,
copper-colored Ford.

How many traits
must a thing have
in order to be singular?

(Echo persuades us
everything we say
has been said at least once 
                                        before.)

Two plump, bald men
in gray tee-shirts
and tan shorts 

are walking a small bulldog –
followed by the eyes
of an invisible third person.

The Trinity was born
from what we know
of the bitter 

symbiosis of couples.
Can we reduce echo’s sadness
by synchronizing our speeches?

Is it the beginning or end
of real love
when we pity a person

because, in him,
we see ourselves?


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Thursday, February 24, 2011

We Wait In Our Loose Attics For a New Season As If For an Ice-Cream Truck

Another couple of pints with GOB last night. He was ha-HA! with obamapology re: the reversal on DOMA. When you (me) consider now DOMA and DADT both were reversed within the first two years of Obama's presidency, I'm (he) stunned you're (me) so underwhelmed by an achievement you would have considered remarkable if asked the day Obama was inaugurated.

Why today, I asked. Why not last week, last month, last year, why not next week next month, next year? A fat Wisconsin pig might have sent Corporate's plans back to marketing for revisions and motherfucking gasoline is going to be $6 a gallon by July, what possible motives could Obama have sparking a Culture War today? (I know it wasn't deployed because of Walker's fuck-up - that would imply an adeptness and agility Corporate doesn't have - but it isn't an accident it was deployed during the public union crisis in preparation for the impending and inevitable Obama/Democratic response.)

Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team, I asked?




It's true, and here's how much schway United has with the District after being, minus three years of Natinals baseball, been the sole tenant since 1996:
The Washington Convention and Sports Authority has scheduled a Howard University football game at RFK Stadium in September, an event that could impact the quality of the playing surface during D.C. United's season.
"Adding economic impact events such as this only enhances our city's vitality as a sports market," Washington Mayor Vincent C. Gray said.
United President Kevin Payne said he hopes to meet with stadium officials next week. The biggest concern, Payne said, are the sideline areas where football players gather. A football field is at least 17 yards narrower than a soccer field, placing players not involved in the action on the flanks of the soccer surface.
I don't think this is the District telling United to fuck off - I think it's about revenue - but I don't dismiss the possibility this is the District telling United to fuck off.










THE WHEELCHAIR BUTTERFLY

James Tate

O sleepy city of reeling wheelchairs
where a mouse can commit suicide if he can

concentrate long enough
on the history book of rodents
in this underground town

of electrical wheelchairs!
The girl who is always pregnant and bruised
like a pear

rides her many-stickered bicycle
backward up the staircase
of the abandoned trolleybarn.

Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze
in midair; and was plucked like a grape
by a child who swore he could take care

of it. O confident city where
the seeds of poppies pass for carfare,

where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart
may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge

in an orange garage of daydreams,
we wait in our loose attics for a new season

as if for an ice-cream truck.
An Indian pony crosses the plains

whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.
Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim.

The Mayor is urinating on the wrong side
of the street! A dandelion sends off sparks:
beware your hair is locked!

Beware the trumpet wants a glass of water!
Beware a velvet tabernacle!

Beware the Warden of Light has married
an old piece of string!

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Consider the Ordinance of Griefs: Should One Begin with the Phenomenal or the Ordinary

Holyfuck, I missed this (h/t):
To the shock of President Hamid Karzai's aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting. The exact language Petraeus used in the closed-door session is not known, and neither is the precise message he meant to convey. But his remarks about the deadly U.S. military operation in Konar province were deemed deeply offensive by some in the room. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.
They said Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, dismissed allegations by Karzai's office and the provincial governor that civilians were killed and said residents had invented stories, or even injured their children, to pin the blame on U.S. forces and force an end to the operation.
"I was dizzy. My head was spinning," said one participant, referring to Petraeus's remarks. "This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd."
Here's my question: What the fuck would tell you to get the fuck out more, Afghanis lying about American ordinance injuring their children or Afghani parents injuring their children for propaganda purposes?

And if the latter is true, what monster presents that as moral justification to stay? Though that is, of course, the self-justification the monster uses to stay.






POEM WITH WISTERIA GROWING ALONG ITS MARGIN

Gary LeFemina

The five cool stars above this town look down
upon the main drag & the bar where a guy once fired
four bullets into a biker who said nothing

to the man, who had just laughed too loud & at an inappropriate moment.
The first shot sounded like the break
of an eight-ball rack, but louder
                                 more resonant. The subsequent squeezes
of the trigger--redundant, more resounding

as they mixed with the shrieks of beer-drinkers.
Hysteria speading among them like wisteria

along a garden fence; its occasional balloons of violet
flowering vividly in the green mesh of its leaves. I remember

lying in such a garden.
remember the lush cologne of pollen & the garnet bees
buzzing their cargo routes between blossoms & a distant apiary.˜


I had thought there was nobody else
in that place, so I was surprised then, when walking its paths later,
to hear weeping. I was amazed
by how sudden & communicable sadness can be--

and how embarrassed the woman became when she glanced up
to see me standing there, the white heart
of a wisteria blossom barely beating in my extended hand. She shook
her head & smiled.

Her face so fragile I thought she'd shatter.

                                                            ˜
Consider the ordinance of griefs:
should one begin with the phenomenal or the ordinary?

I count them on the threads of my shirt
and on the gem-like sparkling of dust

in the slide of light that entrusts itself to my vision.
Then I lose track, distracted by a concert of ambulances & police cruisers: their 
     cacophonic call-and-response.˜


The next morning I heard how the biker's wife insisted
--insisted was the paper's word--it was all her fault:

she had wanted to go out that night.
And her husband, because he loved her
and because it was a lovely October evening & he knew soon he'd have

to stow the Harleys away for winter, because of these things
he agreed, although it was a weeknight
and there'd be an early morning the next day, driving a propane truck.
The jukebox was shaking AC/DC's "Shook Me All Night Long"

and he had just gotten up for another round . . . 
She never mentions the expression on his face, mouth agape,
suddenly soundless. Then the remaining patrons screaming.

                                                            
After the questioning
and after the gunman took his position in a squad car's back seat &
shrank to two dimensions with its slamming door, the officers
let the bartender back inside

and the owners. The three men sat at a table while one of them
poured whiskey into tall tumblers cored with ice. Nobody spoke.

When they finished their drinks
they simultaneously stood, and, still speechless,
went about cleaning up: one of them counting the till;

the others filling buckets with rags & suds
to start removing blood from the walls & carpet--
a task they knew to be futile

but necessary
like this poem, in the end, whatever its message.˜


Weeks passed & still his bike, a 67 Roadster, stood
outside the bar, reverent as a statue.

Then it was gone although nobody knew where it went
or who took it. But I last saw it

parked there beneath a thin skin of fresh powder
and the splayed glove of light from the bar's bay window.
Inside: a small splatter of what may have been blood
blemished the pool table felt like a location on a map

you can't return to, & the new barman
polished the heavy glass mugs with a rag. Outside
the snow wafted scattershot
like blossoms on a dark wall of ivy.


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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The Lüger Hovered Lightly in Its Glove

Bad busy, good busy: too much stuff to do I don't want to do, but more importantly, I finished Littell's The Kindly Ones and need a day or six months to digest that bloat. I've never hated a novel I loved so much or loved a novel I hated so much. I can't stop thinking about it. It's ludicrous and compelling and repellent and complex and messy and horrifying and hilarious and utterly vital. I can't help wondering if Littell read Barth's Sotweed Factor, modeled Thomas Hauser off Henry Burlingame. Probably not. Littell invokes Moby Dick, yo. And Blanchot, for all of you who moisten at the name Blanchot. Anyway, the novel is preoccupying most of my moments of free thought. Rereading scheduled for 2013. No new novel will be started for the foreseeable future. Anyone want my paperback? Email me. More later. Or not.

Meanwhile, buy me an Amtrak ticket to New York, put me up in a decent hotel and buy me a center row ticket for this:





  • Yes, I'll probably return to BLAWG! but hope to leave it here for now: BMPTHNX! to friends who've aimed folks this way of late. I truly appreciate the Kind. More later, soon, probably.
  • BTW, some new reads in blegrells left and right.
  • Gaithersburg High School. Hey! we should go walk through it one more time before they tear it down.
  • Rock snot!
  • ICC!






MORE LIGHT! MORE LIGHT!

Anthony Hecht

Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time   
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,   
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap   
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;   
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,   
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquility.

We move now to outside a German wood.   
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole   
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down   
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill   
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.   
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.   
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.   
When only the head was exposed the order came   
To dig him out again and to get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.   
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute   
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,   
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.


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Monday, February 21, 2011

Where the Dogs Go On with Their Doggy Life

W.H. Auden was born 104 years ago today.


 



MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS


About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.





Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him in exchange for his company on two of his books, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

Until a year or two ago I hadn't read Auden since Hecht's book went to the publisher in 1992, not because I'd lost my love for Auden but because I was tired of my love for Auden. Serendipity always charms but is double-edged: I rediscovered Auden just when his poetry became fresh and relevant and urgent (to me) again.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.


  • Now you know my first name.
  • What if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats: In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people.
  • Ponzi: Progressives should hang their heads in shame at the minimal amount of activism taking place against the banks and the escalating numbers of foreclosures. Homes and hope are being stolen from people for whom the term "depression" now has a personal, as well as economic, meaning.
  • Mideast meets Midwest.
  • Tool for class war.
  • Romney World v Obama World.
  • But I thought union-busting solved educational problems.
  • UPDATE! Everything is negotiation.
  • The American way. 
  • Libya?
  • Doh.
  • Hinge of fate. 
  • Archeologies of the present. 
  • BLAWG! On Blegsylvania.
  • ICC!
  • Borders.
  • Vinyl.
  • Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.




STOP ALL THE CLOCKS

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


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Sunday, February 20, 2011

Those Distant Sirens Down in the Valley Signal Great Hinges in the Lives of Strangers. A Phone Tree.



Joel is 51 today. He got out of MST3K when at it's best; I can't watch Mike episodes.

X has aged horribly to me, not the musicians but the music. Two of the better nights of my life involved X concerts, including one of the best nights in my life, so disclaimer, but there was a time when... Anyway, Billy Zoom is 63 today:







ALBANY

Ron Silliman

If the function of writing is to "express the world." My father withheld child support. forcing my mother to live with her parents. my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can't afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing "We shall not be moved." My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale's speech was drowned by jeers. Ye wretched. She introduces herself as a rape survivor. Yet his best friend was Hispanic. I decided not to escape to Canada. Revenue enhancement. Competition and spectacle. kinds of drugs. If it demonstrates form some people won't read it. Television unifies conversation. Died in action. If a man is a player, he will have no job. Becoming prepared to live with less space. Live ammunition. Secondary boycott. My crime is parole violation. Now that the piecards have control. Rubin feared McClure would read Ghost Tantras at the teach-in. This form is the study group. The sparts are impeccable1 though filled with deceit. A benefit reading. He seduced me. AFT, local 1352. Enslavement is permitted as punishment for crime. Her husband broke both of her eardrums. I used my grant to fix my teeth. They speak in Farsi at the comer store. YPSL. The national question. I look forward to old age with some excitement. 42 years for Fibreboard Products. Food is a weapon. Yet the sight of people making love is deeply moving. Music is essential. The cops wear shields that serve as masks. Her lungs heavy with asbestos. Two weeks too old to collect orphan's benefits. A woman on the train asks Angela Davis for an autograph. You get read your Miranda. As if a correct line would somehow solve the future. They murdered his parents just to make the point. It's not easy if your audience doesn't identify as readers. Mastectomies are done by men. Our pets live at whim. Net income is down 13%. Those distant sirens down in the valley signal great hinges in the lives of strangers. A phone tree. The landlord's control of terror is implicit. Not just a party but a culture. Copayment. He held the Magnum with both hands and ordered me to stop. The garden is a luxury (a civilization of snail and spider). They call their clubs batons. They call their committees clubs. Her friendships with women are different. Talking so much is oppressive. Outplacement. A shadowy locked facility using drugs and double-ceIling (a rest home). That was the Sunday Henry's father murdered his wife on the front porch. If it demonstrates form they can't read it. If it demonstrates mercy they have something worse in mind. Twice, carelessness has led to abortion. To own a basement. Nor is the sky any less constructed. The design of a department store is intended to leave you fragmented, off-balance. A lit drop. They photograph Habermas to hide the harelip. The verb to be admits the assertion. The body is a prison. a garden. In kind. Client populations (cross the tundra). Off the books. The whole neighborhood is empty in the daytime. Children form lines at the end of each recess. Eminent domain. Rotating chair. The history of Poland in 90 seconds. Flaming pintos. There is no such place as the economy, the self. That bird demonstrates the sky. Our home, we were told, had been broken, but who were these people we lived with? Clubbed in the stomach, she miscarried. There were bayonets on campus. cows in India, people shoplifting books. I just want to make it to lunch time. Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World. Letting the dishes sit for a week. Macho culture of convicts. With a shotgun and "in defense" the officer shot him in the face. Here, for a moment, we are joined. The want-ads lie strewn on the table.


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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Shazaminicity!

Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?




It's true! and I reclaim and reestablish my claim to the trademark Fredsux! (I'm sure I did it long before August 2009, but the search engine on the old site sucks and I'm a lazy fuck counting on mine vouching for I'm doing an honest).

More importantly, had I not marked the return of Fredsux! with a post I would have violated all that is left of my honor as Knez of Egoslavia and been forced to moan about needing to quit but not being able to. Endlessly. I love you too much but not as much as I love me to let that happen to me.

Lazy fuck? Watch me plagiarize my email:
My first thought is that either or both Boskovic/Quaranta aren't showing much (wouldn't surprise me if Boskovic is gone mid-July). 
My second thought was Fred's brother is here and might need some big brother influence. Even Kasper Payne must see Juniorsux as the more important sux.
I'm told:
Those are both perfectly reasonable theories.
High praise! Talk turned to the Balkan:
Y'know, I keep forgetting about Branko. Has he even been mentioned in news from the scrimmages? I don't remember seeing a word about him so far.
Me:
Yeah, his name I've seen, and either United's site or UnitedMania or Black and Red interviewed him and Olsen and they made they predictable noises.

To be honest, if I was United, I wouldn't be saying a word about him. If he's great it's a surprise, if he sucks, they want a wasted DP acquisition and wasted $500K to disappear as quietly as possible.

Know who I'm not hearing anything about? Josh Wolff.
Landru:
Okay, I finally have something nice to say about acquiring Fred:

It's better than acquiring Josh Wolff. Who has only ever been overshadowed in pussitude by the now restored-to-grace TDFT.

Kurt Morsink, Josh Wolff, and Fredsux. Jeebus, I might have to fucking forgive fucking Tino.
Me:
If they'd known Davies would've dropped to them I'm guessing Wolff wouldn't have been acquired, especially considering the have Ngwenya too (who HAS been in the scrimmage news in a positive way).

Says much about the Allsopp/Cristman era and it's short-term after-effects.
Landru:
Yeppers. Good thing we can work out our blogs in email, eh?

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Synopsis

Two paragraphs for your consideration as you fall asleep tonight:

In his White House statement, Obama criticized "the use of violence by governments against peaceful protesters." Britain focused its sharpest criticism on Bahrain, revoking licenses that have allowed the kingdom to buy tear-gas canisters, crowd-control ammunition and other equipment. 

The United States last year provided Bahrain with about $21 million in military assistance, a substantial amount given the country's relatively small size. Of that total, about $1 million was designated for counterterrorism aid, much of it to the police and military forces that are suppressing the protests in the country's capital.
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I Try to Teach Her Caution; She Tries to Teach Me Risk

Here's me later today in Sweden:





Now you know my real name. Like the shorts?

I haven't been outside for any outside fun in a month, it's gonna be 70 today, 60 tomorrow, and 50 on Sunday, when I can this putt to birdie Seneca 13D:




Saturday morning we put Planet on an airplane to fly to an interview for a scholarship to one of three colleges she most wants to be accepted into, and I can't imagine that school would be flying her in and meeting her at the airport and driving her the 50 miles to campus and boarding her and feeding her on their dime if she wasn't already in, whether she gets this scholarship or not.

This is the central tension re: why every post always has that one tag. 

Here's the guy who built 13D ace a 450 foot temp hole at Duck:












FATHER'S SONG

Gregory Orr

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.

Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child's blood so red
it stops a father's heart.

My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.

Round and round: bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk.


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Thursday, February 17, 2011

If We Leave These Two Rolled, You Can Wear Them As Patches Over Your Eyes



Geoff Dyer (I confess I know the name but not his work) on his reader's block:
I think of those sublime periods of lamp-lit solitude when, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the reader became the book.” It can still happen, but it has something of the character of the occasional lovemaking of a long-married couple in that it reminds me of how things have changed, of how infrequently I am now consumed by a passion that was once routine. Losing myself in J. M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning Disgrace, I remember how I used to pass from one book to another in a tranced relay of imagined worlds. Looking at André Kertész’s photographs of readers sharing—however precariously perched—in the repose of the text, I find myself wondering and remembering.
I've always whined about readers blocks but mine get deeper, last longer, now that I'm older. I don't exaggerate when I say losing my ability to read novels for hours in bed (ten minutes now average, half hour on good day; my eyes whine, I can either nap or get up) over the past three years has devastated my reading habits (as has this asshat blog, but that's another....)

Can't blame my eyes for the current life blocks, which is different in that it's not a matter of not enough, it's a matter of too much all at once, which should be a good thing. Or rather, it's a good thing that I've got into a lazy habit of thinking a bad thing, or rather yet, I need to stop pretending I'm not having any fun swimming against - and losing to - clusterfuckery's current. You just think you've seen Kind.








BUYING STOCK

Denise Duhamel
"...The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not guarantee total protection and that while there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission would be absolutely impossible." --The Surgeon General, 1987
I know you won't mind if I ask you to put this on.
It's for your protection as well as mine--Wait.
Wait.  Here, before we rush into anything
I've bought a condom for each one of your fingers. And here--
just a minute--Open up.
I'll help you put this one on, over your tongue.
I was thinking:
If we leave these two rolled, you can wear them
as patches over your eyes. Partners have been known to cry,
shed tears, bodily fluids, at all this trust, at even the thought
of this closeness.


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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Autoblogography



Woke up in the worse mood ever since the last worse mood ever and until the next worse mood ever and, what's this in my email box? Thanks pseudonymous emailer! for making this best worse mood ever. Ever.

Motherfucking D-Ladder matches. 




UPDATE!


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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

I Get By Saying Goddammit

I don't mean to minimize what events in Egypt represent, because motherfucking Pell Grants. You go, Mobamafucker. Honestly, whether you think he's a good guy who's fighting an honorable and pragmatic war of strategic retreat against unassailable political winds or you think like I do that he is signaling his fealty to Corporate by gutting the signature federal program for providing education grants to this country's poor, it DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER! except that if you're right that's motherfucking worse.

I've said America is Serbia by 2020. Silber says we're Egypt in 2030.







AND IT CAME TO PASS

C.D. Wright

This june 3
would be different

Time to draw lines

I've grown into the family pores
and the bronchitis

Even up east
I get by saying goddamnit

Who was that masked man
I left for dead
in the shadow of mt. shadow

Who crumbles there

Not touching anything
but satin and dandelions

Not laid his eyes
on the likes of you

Because the unconnected life
is not worth living

Thorntrees overtake the spot

Hands appear to push back pain

Because no poet's death

Can be the sole author
of another poet's life

What will my new instrument be

Just this water glass
this untunable spoon

Something else is out there
goddamnit

And I want to hear it

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