Because I Am So Happy and All the Dismal Issues Have Been Made Tractable at Last, and So I Say to Her that the Late Symphonies of Gustav Mahler Are More Lucid If You’re Sitting Close To, and Above, the Orchestra, so that You Can See the Contrapuntal Lines Moving from Strings to Woodwinds and Then Back Again

Gustav Mahler was born 152 years ago today. Serendipitously, listened to the above two weeks ago, the first below last week, the second below this past Tuesday, found Mahler's name on today's birthday search an hour ago. I'd ODed on Mahler in my thirties, rarely listened in my forties, caught the end of the 2nd on the radio a month ago, and... Hey, I'm still trying to find a photo of the Fed's opulent dining hall for Frances, help solicited, maybe one of you has a father who lives across the alley from Fred Fernancke who can ask his father to ask Fred (to die painfully, slowly) to take a photo of the dining room with his iPhone and send it along for a blogpost about what a motherfucking Corporatist stooge Fred is. Als0 to0: Freeform or Death has received a challenge grant from two anonymous donors.  If we can reach $67,000 by Tuesday night, they will kick in $13,000!  This opportunity is a dream come true that will greatly improve our ability to make festival deadlines for this coming year and ultimately help bring the film to a much larger audience. So give here. Als0 to0, yesterday I read this on this guy's recommendation, I recommend it to you, a couple hours of magic, it's been awhile since I read a work of fiction and daydreamed of air-guitaring it. Als0 to0, the good referenced yesterday is still good, the standard standard, the shitty improving, I acknowledge it really serves no purpose other than excuse, but regular programming will resume soon, or not, though I insist it never stopped.





PLEASE MARRY ME

Charles Baxter

We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
“Please marry me. Your mother likes me,”
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.

Co-Terminus with the Bleeding Hiatus

No Thursday Night Pints, as it should be on the Fifth of July, Redependence Day. Hey, Frances is looking for a photo for of the opulent dining room of the Federal Reserve building in DC for a project she's working on. If you can find one (I haven't so far) please send me the link or the photo and I'll forward it on. Life busy on three fronts, one good, one standard, one shitty. More later, or not.





APPRENTICESHIP

Will Alexander

     ... between impulses and repentances,
     between advances and retreats.
     —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?


Here I am
posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
sonnets as rare
as a live Aegean rhino

absorbing the cracklings of my craft
its riverine volcanoes
its spectacular lightning peninsulas
emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas

scouring through years of unrecognized pablums
of constant arch-rivalry with extinction
bringing up skulls of intensive discourse
by the claws in one’s mind
which seem to burn with systemic reduction

one then suffers poetic scorching by debris
by inaugural timber which flashes
by friction which flares up & harries
by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass
of initial intuitive neglect

as if one’s fangs
were fatally stifled by incipience
by verbal range war didactics
by territorial driftwood
by sudden undemonstrative detractions
awed
by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante

one’s youngish body stands
devoured by reverential print trails
momentarily cancelled
by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval
stung
by demeaning neutralities
ravaged
by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis
by a tasteless collision of rums in transition
by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris

as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees
there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche
with indeterminate earthenware splinters
taking up
from aboriginal density
a forge of Sumerian verbal signs
cooked with a tendency
towards starfish hypnosis
towards psychic confrontational drainage
conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire

yes
apprenticeship
means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic
cringed in smoky interior cubicles
releasing various deleriums
as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star
with its dark incapable tints
with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna

poetics
an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies
stretching under a blue marsupial sun
like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed
fugaciously transfixed
upon an anomalous totem of glints
upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions
above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise

of course
kinetic
like magical malachite rivers
flowing from moons
blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas

I’ve looked
for only the tonalities that scorch
which bring to my lips wave after wave
of sensitivity by virulence

yes
a merciless bitterness
brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs
in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter
in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage
like a scattered igneous wind
co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath

resolved by flash point edicts
by consumptive stellar limes
by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue

mixing magnets
juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities
cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas

yes
hatcheries
floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint
to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette
its mysteriums
always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas
or leaking moon spun alloestrophas*
as if speaking
in irregular glossological green Dutch

a frenetic seminar on febricity
a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging
a ferocious vacillation
explosive as random “aggregational” nodes
mimed by a black consonantal dissection
its maximal priority
forked at “hypotactic inclusion”
with isochronous internal procedure
with ratios
with phonic penetralia by distortion
primed by anomalous “nuclear accent”
by a cadence composing syllables & compounds

yes
poetics
its force
jettisoned by “hypotaxis”
by ... paratactic co-ordination
& fire

To Encourage Pursuit of Intellectual Professions a City's Central Thoroughfare Might Be Called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the Edge of Town the Thoroughways and By Ways Could Commemorate Abstractions and Generalized Conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway)

Dig these three paragraphs:

But Regan bluntly asserted that Scottish football simply cannot afford to have Rangers outwith the top two tiers of the league structure, with his argument not confined to the commercial impact their absence would have.

“Without Rangers, there is social unrest and a big problem for Scottish society,” claimed Regan. “They have a huge fan base and to contemplate the situation where those fans don’t have a team to support, where those fans are effectively left without a game to follow, I just think that could lead to all sorts of issues, all sorts of problems for the game.

“Tribalism in football is really important. It is part of the game. People follow their clubs with pride, it is passed down from generation to generation. There are thousands of Rangers fans whose fathers and parents and grandfathers have been Rangers fans. You can’t contemplate a situation without that and if Rangers weren’t to exist that could have real dire consequences."

Dig this paragraph:

“Do this research. If we don’t have a season, watch how much evil, which we call it crime, watch how much crime picks up when you take away our game,”  [Ray Lewis] said.

Ray Lewis was referring to the poor who'd lose a vitally important source of income schlepping beer up and down aisles for fucks like me if stadiums lost their two preseason and eight regular season home games (see here, and call me when a Villager asks Obama about this and he bwahahas), the Scottish fuck worried that out-of-tribe peasants will inconvenience the rich with tribal violence normally flood-channeled into hating Celtic. Still, it's an interesting contrast and compare, the metaphors finely abounding.

UPDATE! Fuckyousaurus Rex.

• Said without exaggeration, holyfuck do I love that song and that video. Love love love. Every month when I think, wait, did I do a theme song, I check youtube to see if this song/video is embeddable (it hasn't been in xxx months) and it's always viewable, but the embedding, when it does appear soon goes away... So I have America's Independence Day to thank, looking for that Galaxie 500 song I discovered embeddable Theme Song July 2012, at least the third time it's been Theme Song of Month. Serendipity is Awesome, as well as finely abounding metaphors.
• Here's some background on Rangers' issues, if you've not been playing along. Use the google if you want to learn more.
• It pisses me off United doesn't have another home game for three and a half weeks, I'm going to rob a bank.
• The commie, John Adams.
• The hidden history of Independence Day.
• Police state.
• Rewrite.
• On republics.
• Why aren't we freaking out about the LIBOR scandal? I assume it's a rhetorical question.
• Bunch of LIBOR links.
• Time to get crazy?
• Give me liberty or give me endless internet arguments.
• A recommendation to diaperize the econ dept of George Mason. 
• There are asshole professors in all departments, but I can assure you, for consistence assholery, econ and MBA professors are consistently the biggest assholes on campus.
• This is a good thing.
• Pepis.
• The Portland home kit is gorgeous.
• Pepis.
• Orlando FC has a gorgeous home kit.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• What is an Aaron Sorkin? 
• John Siddique? Anyone know of his poetry? Good thing I have access to a university library's Interlibrary Loan service.
• On email and love.
• Ken channels his Michael Savage. Go on, do yourself a favor.
• Waiting for Wotan's Korean vacation.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.

[THE LOST PINES INN WOULD BE A GOOD NAME FOR A MOTEL...]

Lyn Hejinian

The Lost Pines Inn would be a good name for a motel, or No Sheep in the Meadow, The Lost Egos, The Downtown Country Inn, Mike and Ann's, Doug and Diane's, Bob and Joe's or Just Joe's Hotel, Warm Toes Hotel, Anything Goes Inn, The Come Inn, The Company Retreat, The Hermit's Den, La Cave, The Little House Hotel, The Reliquary, The Happy Family Inn, The Rooster's Coop, The Corky Floor, The Henhouse Hotel, The Egg-in-a-Nest, The Rooks Retreat, The Cooks Inn, The Beat A Retreat, and a music group could call itself Crested Loader, or 10-Second Crossing, or 9 Car Train, or Thumb on the Space Bar, or the Unlike Minimums, The Shepherds Without Sheep, Sheep Without Sleep, Two Feminines, Autism, The Twice Maniacs, The Genetics, The Nasty Uncles, Interfering Women, but streets get named typically after numbers or trees of they're given the names of prominent as well as lesser-known citizens or the names of great cities of the world or the great letters of the alphabet from A to Z but in celebration of the things we consume the names of products and objects should be given to some streets (Tagliatelle Lane, Glue Stick Street, iPod Alley) and to encourage pursuit of intellectual professions a city's central thoroughfare might be called Mathematics Avenue, Neurochemistry Street, Jurisprudence Boulevard, or Lit Crit Street while at the edge of town the thoroughways and by ways could commemorate abstractions and generalized conditions (as in Global Capital Street, Logic Throughway, Affluence Alley, Interruption Boulevard, Domination Interstate, Accumulation Highway) and another great name for a motel would be The Soporif's Inn, or The Archive, and Duke, High Spot, Drummer, Archimedes, Shadow, Ranger, and Gamelon might name some of the 220 horses at work under the hood of the blue 2003 220-horse power P.T. Cruiser that got me home by bedtime.

Theme Song July 2012

The News from Fleabustan (a Pun It Took *Ten Months* to Occur to Me, WTF?), Plus Earthgirl's Power, Plus the Two Fourth of July Songs You'd Expect Me to Post

There Is a Certain Challenge in Being Humane to Hornets but Not Much

Here's the Long Fin Killie/Bows cascade I've been threatening. Because fine metaphors always abound, the SCOTUS Bowl and the post-game wrap-up and the post-Deracho powerlessness both serve emblematically for my scowling malaise here, there, everywhere, sorry for putting that McCartney song in your head, but it's in mine. Have I mentioned that in the midst of eye-slumps and heart-slumps and soul-slumps and general damn-slumps, my ears have never been better? Some may disagree. Here, have this Long Fin Killie song:

• Yes, horrible youtube, but that's my favorite Long Fin Killie song, please play it loud and fine metaphors abound. 
• His generation's greatest academic fraud (as always, I say this with genuine admiration) zizeks himself in a Zizekian defense of Zizek! I consider myself undefinable in ways beyond your comprehension too, for what that's worth, as do you you too.
• The myth of the toothless president. 
• Obamacarelessness.
• Fixing healthcare good.
• The movement for involuntary complexity.
• Yes, look at those blogrolls, Blog Days of Summer.
• A Schuyler of urgent concern. Saw that this morning at ::wood s lot::, which you should bookmark or RSS, eihdfmw. Serendipitously, I checked in a copy of Schuyler's Collected Poems a week or so ago, it's sitting on my desk. 
• Understatements.
• Live blogging Marmington Fissouri.
• The Millions list of upcoming books includes a new volume of Seidel poems and novels by Stephen Dixon, William Vollmann (a Seven Dreams!), Mark Danielewski, and William Gass! but no Ishiguro.
• Minor poets, major works.
• Blur never mwahhed me, but if you, here's two new Blur songs.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• Listening to Bows reminds me of Flunk, but that's another cascade.

BURIED AT SPRINGS

James Schuyler

I

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock
of someone shipping oars:
it’s eleven years since
Frank sat at this desk and
saw and heard it all
the incessant water the
immutable crickets only
not the same: new needles
on the spruce, new seaweed
on the low-tide rocks
other grass and other water
even the great gold lichen
on a granite boulder
even the boulder quite
literally is not the same

II

A day subtle and suppressed
in mounds of juniper enfolding
scratchy pockets of shadow
while bigness—rocks, trees, a stump—
stands shadowless in an overcast
of ripe grass. There is nothing
but shade, like the boggy depths
of a stand of spruce, its resonance
just the thin scream
of mosquitoes ascending.
Boats are light lumps on the bay
stretching past erased islands
to ocean and the terrible tumble
and London (“rain persisting”)
and Paris (“changing to rain”).
Delicate day, setting the bright
of a young spruce against the cold
of an old one hung with unripe cones
each exuding at its tip
gum, pungent, clear as a tear,
a day tarnished and fractured
as the quartz in the rocks
of a dulled and distant point,
a day like a gull passing
with a slow flapping of wings
in a kind of lope, without
breeze enough to shake loose
the last of the fireweed flowers,
a faintly clammy day, like wet silk
stained by one dead branch
the harsh russet of dried blood.

Bell Cosmos

Hamster discovered and sent along today a 2010 article on Chris Bell, Big Star's "other genius." I knew some of the history but not all; I haven't listened to Bell's I Am the Cosmos in maybe five years. I do have a Long Fin Killie cascade in the bloogercan but am too aarghed in real life and bloogerpooped here to fill in the blanks: verily, fuck it. Still, any excuse to post Big Star is a good excuse. All Big Star songs from Record #1, Bell singing lead.

(What's the Bus that Comes by Here?)

Just saying here so I don't say it there and I don't say it here tomorrow.

UPDATE! Als0 to0, Koi Pond and Bardo Pond.

United 3, Montreal 0

Couldn't make it, I feel horrible, but was on call because of the storm on four different fronts, couldn't see it because motherfucking Comcast blacks out Direct Kick in DC. Forgive me. Now there's not another home game until July 28, and that just a friendly, not another home league game until August 4th, weird-ass schedule this year. Here's Fullback, here's Goff, here's Webb, here's Shatzer.  Goddamn it, I feel I betrayed a faith.