Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Rarely Has a Large or Distant Expedition Ever Succeeded in Its Object




I don't think I did last year but for years on this shitty blog I ran a sidebar widget countdown clock posted months ahead of United's season opener. This season's opener is this Saturday at 8:00 in Houston, no clock. I give a fuck, I give as much of a fuck relative to how much I've always given a fuck now as I always have, it's not the quantity of fuck I have it's the quality of fuck I have. Proportionately, I give the same fuck about United versus everything else not Me and Mine now as then. Home opener, as ad says, is March 9 at the new starting time for home games 7:05, the motherfuckers, stealing a half hour of my weekend daylight, and there are mid-afternoon and late-afternoon starts, the motherfuckers, I don't need the dark after the game, I want the fucking sunlight before the game. It pisses me off, more than the shitty beer selection that awaits me at the stadium. It is a sad state that proportionately I give the same fuck about United versus everything else not Me and Mine now as then. As for predictions, last March when United had the two Balkans I thought mid-table, maybe squeak in to MLS's rinkydink playoffs - United finished with third highest points (which should get them into CONCACAF's Champions League, but because MLS runs a rinkydink unbalanced schedule and a rinkydink playoff system, finishing third in a table of nineteen teams gets you friendlies against Everton on its couldn't give-a-fuck summer North American tour). This season, without the Balkans, with System Saint Benny in place and his choices of players to deploy, they'd better do well because Hamid and Kitchen will be in Europe by next January (and in Brazil Summer of 2014). Because I believe - and all anyone talks about anywhere at any time is belief and its belief in belief and its belief about belief (I believe in typing the same word unto foreign unfamiliarity while still believing in its sound as an English word, it's what I do here, how successfully YMMV) - because I believe United's window of opportunity, at least the DeRossario and Kitchen and Hamid window, closes after this season, I'm hoping to increase both the quality of my fuck and the quantity of my fuck re: United versus everything else not Me and Mine. YES! I know yesterday was Frank Bridge's 134th birthday:





  • To celebrate today's suspension of documenting the droning arrgh, a return to bulletpoints.
  • There is never a suspension of saying, Fuck Blooger, Fuck Google. Hey, is there anyone out there I can trust who has the skills to look at this shitty blog's code and fix whatever it is I broke when I copy/pasted the word knez in the original Cyrillic into the description field? I cannot change anything about the template. It drives me nuts at least one night a week.
  • Banned performance enhancing drugs in literary competitions.
  • On first readings.
  • Elegance in elegy.
  • I confess again I am not a short story person - never have been - no doubt in part because while I'm capable of writing shitty short stories I've not the organization skills necessary to write a shitty novel (or the belief that I'd be able to finish the shitty novel without deploying what annoys me about short stories, the epiphany that wraps things up) - so here is Dan and Richard reassuring me my inability to believe in the wonders of George Saunders is not weird.
  • Though, and maybe it was the influence of the woman I was dating more than the stories, I remember liking Elizabeth Bowen's short stories thirty years ago.
  • The 50 ugliest college campuses. College Park is 15th! HEY, Paleo 101, Hampshire's the 2nd ugliest!
  • Hey, Big-C is going to be on Jeopardy this Friday night!




  • Says it was taped in late October, says he made enough to pay for his plane flights, says he'll be at the home opener on the 9th!
  • Keith Waldrop's haunted realism. I dig his poetry (his wife's Rosemary Waldrop's too, use the search box top left, hopefully it will pull up their poems I've posted), and totally unfamiliar with the fiction. Good thing I have access to a university library's collections and consortia and interlibrary loan, I believe in taking advantage of them.
  • Herr Stimmung on Transparency.
  • Trying to imagine in advance what we were never supposed to know.
  • The new Pynchon: The appetites of Thomas Pynchon's legion of fans will be whetted by the news that the cult favourite's forthcoming novel takes place in New York City's hi-tech zone of Silicon Alley.Bleeding Edge, which will be published in America on 17 September this year, will be set in 2001 "in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11", said Pynchon's American publisher Penguin in its 2012 results announcement yesterday. Shazam!
  • This is a fucking poem.
  • Freddie Mercury's chicken dhansak.
  • Fingers, The Juice.
  • Wanna hear a new Replacements track?
  • Holyfuck, I am such a rube for this sound:






MAJESTY

Keith Waldrop

Among other economies, I’m of two
minds, one possessed, the other
a deep peace. Violent trembling
seizes me, launched in the interval.

Enemy of children, of quaint little
things, of jokes and pictures. Enemy
of comic papers and caricatures, of
water-drinking. Too short for tragedy.

Rarely has a large or distant expedition
ever succeeded in its object, as may be
seen in the failure of foreign missions, of
human development, the immediate phenomena.

Sympathy for the victors, who gallantly
perish. Collateral catastrophes, as if they
had a will. The more distinctive visual images
sail too long, relinquish, burst.

The “inner voice” is playing a game. Eagerness
and obstinacy. A mysterious invisible
placed in the mouth. We know too well how
terrible it is to contend against personality.

The whole idyll vanishes. Southward along
a coastline, down among cities. Across the
gulf to the promontory. Probably
astonished. Not without mistrust.

You are now my prisoner. Physically I am
myself. Cultivated living, good manners, rich
food and drink, order and elegance in
my house. Erect military bearing.



3 comments:

  1. Not a single Ohiostan school on that list? We're so pretty, oh so pretty.

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    Replies
    1. We've got the most beautiful asbestos ridden architorture around!

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    2. Since they were cherry-picking name-brand universities and slagging their libraries I was alert with anticipation as I worked down the list. The library at Illhoptay, called Auingerlay, is notorious as one of the ugliest buildings in DC, it would have made heads explode in my tiny universe, could have been fun.

      I've only been to campuses in Bumpkin Ohio and all of them are nice, most very nice. I suspect Youngstown State looks nothing like Athens.

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