Spat a Phrase

I'm guessing I've been told as many times as I've forgot that J.S. Bach shares a birthday with Planet. I deeply respect but don't love Bach, just as I deeply respect but don't love Richard Powers who - I swear this is true - I thought about yesterday afternoon when someone asked me about post-911 novels and I told her about The Echo Maker and who wrote an astonishing novel that I deeply respect but don't love called Goldbug Variations which, yes, Bach-structured. Bless serendipity. As for the Gould, when I remember Bach I remember the Gould. Hey! Know who turns 81 today?

• Lest you think I kid about my faith in serendipity, the Bowie cover I posted Tuesday night I discovered listening that morning to an archive of that early morning's Dark Night of the Soul.
• The Desperate Edges of Now. 
• My antenna are off - I thought Axelrod's "mittzkrieg" comment would have caused a firestorm.
• Also, I wonder who called off the Great Goldberg/Sullivan War of Beinart.
• Power and politics.
• Fucking shoot me:

• Silliman's incredibly generous lit links.
• Waiting for Wotan, continued.
• Roky Erickson!
• Robert Pollard! More later today, probably.
• Heard Bolcom on the radio. Have some.

ETYMOLOGY

Marilyn Nelson

The filth hissed at us when we venture out -
always in two or threes, never alone -
seems less a language spoken than one spat
in savage plosives, primitive, obscene:
a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame
of reference and novelty, the same
suggestions of what we or they could do,
a should, ad infinitum. Yesterday
a mill girl spat a phrase I'd never heard
before. I stopped and looked at her, perplexed.
I derived its general meaning from the context,
but was stumped by the etymology of one word.
What was its source? Which demon should we thank
for words it must be an abomination to think?