Saturday, May 7, 2011

Deconstruction Found the Moving Circle



Thursday Night Pints turned quickly from Garyland to Osama's assassination and reassessing Obama. Would you have bounced as much if Osama had been killed by these awesome Navy Seals by order of George Bush in 2007, I asked, because I've no doubt I would have been suspicious of the official timing and timeline and narrative as it shifted, I would have screamed how Republicans would shamelessly politicize the killing, but mostly I would have bitched and bewailed the further assertion of claims of omnipotence for both American power and the imperial presidency. Snuff, anybody, anywhere, anytime, awesome.

Well, the celebrations were sickening, said L, on the yahooing prior to Thursday Night Pints. L, I love you, but look at that photo above, taken Friday. The question isn't whether Osama deserved to be killed, the question is whether the people who decided to kill him deserved that right. D said, Osama and Obama were playing the same game under the same rules. That didn't exactly win though it happens to be true, and about us too, but it was D's turn for a ridiculously priced scotch.

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true, and they're gonna try to win back-to-back MLS games for the first time in two years tonight at RFK! Weather is going to be beautiful. See you there!










THE EIGHTIES

Brenda Hillman

An Essay

A friend asks, "What was at stake for you in the Eighties?" She's trying to figure out Bay Area Poetry. There was Reagan's New Morning for America. Garfield dolls stuck to the backs of windshields with suction cups. At the beginning of the Eighties I was married & at the end i was not. The Civil Rights Movement became kind of quiet. Feminism became kind of quiet. An editor told a woman he couldn't read her poems because it said she was a mother in her bio. Many thought about word materials. Environmentalism got kind of quiet. The earth spirits were not quiet. Buildup of arms. Iran-Contra. Savings & Loan scandal. Tax cuts gave way to library closings. The Challenger went down with the first woman astronaut aboard. People read letters to her on TV. Mini-golf places with purple castles opened on Highway 80 in the Eighties. Chernobyl exploded & the media announced it as a setback for nuclear energy. People ate out more because of tax cuts. i fell in love with a poet. Earth dropped its dark clock. A few wrote outside the margins. Mergers & Acquisitions. The Bay continued to shrink. Many got child-support checks. Many came out. Deconstruction found the moving circle. A few read Lacan. Guns 'n Roses Sweet Child o' Mine. Our daughter drew pictures of trucks with colored fur. She had 24 ear infections in one year so why were you not supposed to write mother in your bio. Many wrote the lyric with word materials. The Soviet Union began to free prisoners. America freed fewer prisoners. Superconductivity. Gorbachev became president instead of something else. One son went to college. We cried. There was no e-mail. Art pierced the image. Blue-rimmed clouds hurried past outside & in. Some wrote about childhood; some wrote about states of mind; some wrote word materials instead of about. Symbolist poetry, by then 120 years old, pushed the dream nature of the world. Hypnotherapy. i began the trance method. In the Eighties, Mr. Tam stayed the same. Mt. Diablo stayed almost the same. Many species died & would not return. At stake. One son started a punk band; he had a one-foot-high purple Mohawk. i listened to the tape with another mother trying to make out the words. Oliver North held up his right hand. Reagan turned off his hearing aid. Sentences fell apart but they had always been a part. Yeltsin. Walesa. Wall comes down. Romania. El Salvador. Noriega. Some elderly folk lived on dog-food when their pensions collapsed. People worried about children, lovers, ex-husbands, jobs. Consciousness stayed alive. Interest rates leapt through the vault of the sky. We cried & cried. We made food & quit smoking. We learned the names of wildflowers & forgot them & relearned them. This was only the beginning. There's so much more to be said in answer to your question.


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Friday, May 6, 2011

there are so many tictoc clocks everywhere telling people what toctic time it is for tictic instance five toc minutes toc past six tic

My bleggal ethics require me, though I don't mind at all, to note the retirement of University of Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams. I didn't go to Maryland (well, I did a year of library school at CLIS and said, Fuck that emphatically), but I had been a Maryland basketball fan since Lefty brought in Len Elmore and Tom McMillen in the early 70s until I lost interest when the one-and-dones changed the game over the past decade*. I actually don't like to root just for the uniform.

Gary took a program still grievously shocked by Len Bias' death (Len Bias was the best player I ever saw play in person) and on severe probation for rules violations by his predecessor and reestablished Maryland as the clear third best ACC program and won - with a senior/junior based team - as honest a national championship as can be when run by the NCAA racketeers. He ran a clean program, and if at 67 he still won't give handjobs to AAU coaches in exchange for access to their prima donnas but is tired of hearing how he can't win because he won't, Lefty bless him.









  • The Kindly Ones. As some asshat commented there: I loved hating it so much I still can’t stop thinking about it two months later.
  • The Kindly Ones.
  • Lit-links.
  • Terry Riley.
  • Missed.
  • Swim.
  • When I laugh.
  • Lovetown.
  • I had a bunch more songs (and lit-links and moco links and general links) but motherfucking blooger ate the post, a much more frequently happening occurrence. What the fuck? So, here's Lisa's Bennie (and a reminder to send your cats to me):





9.

E.E. Cummings

there are so many tictoc
clocks everywhere telling people
what toctic time it is for
tictic instance five toc minutes toc
past six tic

Spring is not regulated and does
not get out of order nor do
its hands a little jerking move
over numbers slowly

   we do not
wind it up it has no weights
springs wheels inside of
its slender self no indeed dear
nothing of the kind.

(So,when kiss Spring comes
we'll kiss each kiss other on kiss the kiss
lips because tic clocks toc don't make
a toctic difference
to kisskiss you and to 
kiss me)




Well, doublefuck, motherfucking youtube is broken and won't provide embedding code. Song later, or not.
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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Sixty-Eight Today




Dennis the Peasant. Also, this guy in my favorite Python skit ever:




Wish I could find clips of Miles Cowperthwaite, though here's a transcript. Digital pint to you if you can find any. Also, please feel free to post any Palin (both Python and post-Python) clips you like in comments.
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United 2, Seattle 1




Bill Hamid, if he continues his trajectory, will be competing for the top keeper spot for USMNT for WC14. He can be that good. Without Hamid - and without Seattle's sucky inability to finish - United loses last night by five.

Yes, the offense was better and the two goals were beautiful (and all I ask for in life are beautiful goals in the run of play) and Najar looked great offensively (oh, if that one shot hadn't hit post that sequence would be in endless reruns), but don't mistake Seattle's one goal - and that on a dubious PK called on a dive by the despicable Freddy Montero - as a result of better United defense, because no. Look at the shots Hamid saved, the shots Seattle gacked. Kitchen may or not be all that's promised someday, but he's lost and over his head now, whether in center or, as last night, on the right. White may or not be all that's promised, but he's lost and over his head now. Facundo Jakovic is just erpen reincarnated.

It's not just the back - Nodax sucking isn't news (though the second half was his best 45 minutes of the season), but the sudden diminishing of Simms is shocking - he looks ten pounds fat and half a second slow and one poorly timed lunge from a two-month hammy. Pontius hustles but is always out of position, and when Fredsux is sent on for midfield defensive reinforcement, that speaks to how disinterested and ineffective Najar is in tracking back. Watch that video again and note how often Najar is the player beaten when Hamid is making a save or Seattle is gacking.

Sure, I'm reverse taunting. Good happened - three points worth. Seattle is the softest of the three in this homestand, and a fuller evaluation need wait for after this Saturday v Dallas and the following Saturday v Colorado - when I hope people show up! I saw NOBODY last night but that asshole hipster pig who sits in seat one in our row, not mine (who were out on business), not John or Skip or that creepy guy named Andy who looks vaguely like Harry Shearer who's in the row in front of us or any other good guy 232ers, not even that Belgian couple in 300 behind us. Yes, a midweek game in May, but what the fuck? Can't claim hockey game again, yo.
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

As If Some Sorcery Had Shocked the Occupant's Hand Alive Again, Back to Compose a Document in Calligraphy So Dragonish That a Single Misstep Made It Necessary to Stop Right Then and There and Tear the Botched Draft Up

I bought a calligraphy pen yesterday afternoon and wrote this post's first draft to test writing with the calligraphy pen (I'd never used one before) on a piece of graph paper I'd already stained with watercolor. I wrote sentences about the routinizing (I wrote routinization - there's no back space with calligraphy pens, I discovered) of torture, how that is the greater sin to perpetually kayfabing rubes like me, not the clandestine torture we assumed was going on quietly, reluctantly but professionally while we were growing up. I was complaining, one president ago, the torture betrayal wasn't the torture but the get-the-fuck-used-to-it revelations of torture.

America tortured, tortures, will torture, America rode genocide and slavery and imperialism to empire and will use any means necessary to perpetuate that empire, including but not limited to torture and genocide, and the state of my complicity is this: I wrote the first draft of this post about my lost kayfabe innocence with a calligraphy pen I bought yesterday afternoon to amuse myself.




The manic good mood is gone, but I need to push the what the fuck before I lose that too. Also, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true! and they have a home game tonight versus a neon lime green team, so tune in tomorrow when I drive away more readers with a game recap. Also, since Fleabus photos are back, especially greatest hits, a reminder once again that all Fleabus photos are by Planet, at least for now, I'll reevaluate come the Fall, but I've a massive archive. Also, for those of you who are back for the first time in a week or so, here, for the last time, is a link to what's up with the blue. (Also, in Thai if needed.)







UPDATE!

RIP, Trelane:








  • One of my goals in life is to be the cranky old neighborhood coot with more cats than can be counted and creepy garden statuary, so please send your cat photos and I'll post them. They're not just welcome here, they're solicited.
  • Wonderful librarians. I am not a librarian, though I work in a library.
  • Rapid transit?
  • One mile from my house.
  • Gaithersburg's astronomic history!
  • MOCO trees!


UPDATE!

Seat Six has bagged on tonight's game v Neon Lime Green @ RFK @ 730, so I have an extra ticket! Hamster has until 2PM to claim it and has been so notified by email, but if he either doesn't respond and/or can't go, you have until 3PM to put in your claim. I will be offline from 3PM until I get home after the game, so if you want me to pdf the ticket and email it to you, you must get your email to me by 3PM.








THE NIGHT SHIP

Timothy Donnelly

Roll back the stone from the sepulchre's mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery

had shocked the occupant's hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish

that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,

begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture

that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,

that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn forward by the spell

of the sea's one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.

Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge of a chair

so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,

baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden

dust devil spirals in from the dunes—a perfect excuse 
to duck back indoors. (The sand spangles their eyes,

the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow's pencil would ever dare to sketch,

and even then, it wouldn't be a cakewalk, you realize.
A dust devil at sea would be called a waterspout.)

You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets of this 

imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know 

what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
collapses around us; another beautiful document

disassembles into anguish—a cymbal-clap—and we can't
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship

trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.

And we will find protection only on the night ship.

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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

I Have Even Forgotten His Name, That Messenger Who Came to Me with Tablespoons of Blue Lentils

So much for my manic good mood. If expanding the panopticon and routinizng torture aren't working it's proof there's not enough, if expanded panopticon and routinized torture work it's proof we need more.













APOCALYPSE

Gerald Stern

Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went 
to the four corners though I don't say it
out of pride but more like a type of regret,
and I did it because there was no one I truly believed 
in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye
and arrived at the rough tables I saw the only other
elder who was a vegetarian--in Scotland--
and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle
to get from place to place; and I immediately
stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups;
and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties
though one day I got a letter from his daughter
that he had died in an accident; he was
I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair
with one eternal gospel to proclaim
to those inhabiting the earth and every nation;
and now that I go through my papers every day
I search and search for his letters but to my shame 
I have even forgotten his name, that messenger
who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.



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Monday, May 2, 2011

He Has No Expertise in the Matter of Civilian Corpses, nor of Friendly Fire, nor Beheadings, nor Revenge, nor Suicide




Nation of motherfucking crackers. You have to ask yourself, why would Barack Hussein Obama, secret Muslim plant intent on imposing an American caliphate under Sharia law, kill Osama bin Laden now, and the only possible answer is Osama must have been near death anyway, wanted to go out both as a martyr while advancing the political career of his top sleeper agent Obama. Pint to the first of you who finds a pig - or libertarian or pwoggle - earnestly advancing this theory.

Here, what this guy says. What bin Laden's death changes: nothing, and for the heartsickeningly and bloodthirsty worse. His death means we never have to examine what motivated him in the first place ever again, just like his life.












THE BOOK OF THE DEAD MAN (NOTHING)

Marvin Bell
1. About the Dead Man and Nothing

The dead man knows nothing.
He is powerless to stop the battles, he has no way to reattach the arms and legs.
He cannot stuff the fallen soldier's insides back inside.
He has no expertise in the matter of civilian corpses, nor of friendly fire, nor 
     beheadings, nor revenge, nor suicide.
He does not know the depth of depth charges, or the exact pressure that detonates 
     a land mine.
The dead man has given his all so that now, if he once knew, he knows nothing.
He is emptied, he is the resonant cavity of which he spoke when it was music he was 
     thinking of.
Let him be now the leftover button of his work shirt.
Permit him his fading mirror, his sputtering circuits, his secrets, his tears, his 
     noonday duels with the sun.
Let him ride the roads in the bucket of an earth mover, can it hurt?
Let him stand under the icicles, can he catch cold?
For the dead man is stagnant without knowledge, and he cannot survive the demise of 
     philosophy or art. 
To the dead man they were not spectacles, but survival skills.
To the dead man, the world was but a birthmark that befell original space.
To say that the dead man knows nothing is to see him at the beginning, who can it hurt?
Before all this, he was nothing.


2. More About the Dead Man and Nothing

Don't bet he won't be born.
Before all this, this that is so much, he was not himself.
He was the free heat of space and then the salt of the earth.
He was the ring around the moon, foretelling.
The dead man had no station when he came to be, just a strange nakedness in the light.
He did not know what he was to do, this was before clocks.
So he decided to stab the dirt, to tumble in happiness and writhe in pain, and to 
     flap his way into space.
To go home.
It was a swell idea for the dead man, and he pinned it to his chest.
Give him that, that he crystallized a plan, that he made from smoke something to 
     him as real as quartz, ivory, or the hoof of a gelding.
The dead man had the whole world to transform or perfect or outlive.
He wrote the book of nothing and no-time that entombed all time and all that took 
     place in time.
The dead man could not be hammered by analysis.
Let him horn in on your fury, whatever it was, and it will abate.
The energy that became form will disperse, never again to be what we were.
Look out the window to see him, no, the other one.


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Sunday, May 1, 2011

None Are Green, or Purple with Green Rings, or Green with Yellow Rings, or Yellow with Blue Rings

So, noxzema bottle blue it is, my favorite color ever and always (maroon second, school-bus yellow third). How do Fleabus' eyes look against it?




I am an agnostic in love with ritual and honor and order steeped in self-mysticism, but you've been here before and come back so you know this. Have you ever noticed how only one particular Fleabus photo appears on any one post though it may appear many times on that post? How the links move inward, from the farthest to nearest? How I've only posted twice here what I create that I value more and post elsewhere, both times on dares? I've rules. I'm a fucking dictator. It takes breaking a reading slump and the manic energy released to create new and better ways to bind myself tighter. Blue stays!





I'm canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool, so I have nothing to do with any blogs that changed themes subsequent to my going noxzema bottle blue. In Blegsylvania hiatuses and abandonments abound. Some are sounding their damn, some finding it deep, some shallow, some both. Blogfriends are moving on, moving in. I've disappointed some: it's not giving up or giving in, it's my willing consent to a comfortable pragmatism at the heart of my complicity. All I have is me and mine.

Everything is negotiation: I couldn't change to noxzema bottle blue until I got a release from a friend who didn't know I couldn't do noxzema bottle blue because she told me it hurt her eyes. Noxzema bottle blue it is, the irony being I will now impose new rules (while honoring most of the old ones) on my bleggal propriety while arguing anew against rules others would impose on me while simultaneously and contentedly I obey them.









  • Named after John Boorman, who I had to google. Apparently he's a movie director (I kid you not when I say I don't watch many movies - it's not a moral stance, it just doesn't occur to me to watch movies; folks can vouch.). That it's John is a good thing because I was wondering why they would name their cat after Martin Bormann, especially as I just read The Kindly Ones in the past few months.
  • How's Napoleon look in a fish-eye lens?











DISILLUSIONMENT OF TEN O'CLOCK

Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.


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