The Calico Cat Stretches Her Long Body Out Across the Top of My Computer Monitor, Yawning, Its Little Primitive Head a Cave of Possibility

• Nick Cave is 56 today, and that's this shitty blog's Theme Song Six and the Offical Bleggalgazing Anthem.
• Fourteen Nick Cave collaborations.
• Re: last nights post, for the record, I think the pattern of Napoleon's disappearing and the activation and success of the Napoleon Alert System is related to good weather, when there is a string of nice days for a cat, not hot, not cold, not wet, not scary, he roams. If the days string together we don't see him for days, after seven, six, five days I activate the alert, the changeability of weather running the about circuit. It was the thunderstorms and change in barometer that brought Napoleon home yesterday, not the Napoleon Alert System. I've not proof of the first nor proof against the second, mind.
• In defense of the humanities.
• Someone in the Washington Post said today what I said last Tuesday about the Navy Yard shootings (I'm not going to make you link back anymore, I know you don't link back, I said Navy Yard shootings, old news by Thursday except to those directly and secondarily affected, whose pain I in no means seek to minimalize).
• Dying for control: an exhausted culture, founded on psychological manipulation.
• What if the kleptocracy wants a default?
• Large predictions in history.
• Digestive apparatus of Babylon.
• Why is Canada so boring?
• Concrete Islands/Interstitial Sublime.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Hart Crane: general aims and theories.
• Peaches Shuttleworth has arrived!
• Dancing Kafka.
• How well does contemporary fiction address radical politics?

• SeatSix, who I love like a brother, is a big Concrete Blonde fan, today is Johnette Napolitano's birthday, SeatSix sends a playlist. I like most of the songs, really like a couple, really hate Joey.
• God is a Bullet.
• Take Me Home.
• Everybody Knows.
• Mexican Moon.
• Scene of a Perfect Crime.
• Someday.
• Someday (Letterman).
• When I Was a Fool.
• Dance Along the Edge.
• Joey, requested, would be here if I played Joey on this shitty blog, I won't play Joey here even for a brother.
• Lullaby.
• Darkening of the Light.
• Days and Days.
• Caroline.
• Tomorrow Wendy.
• As always, playlists are welcome whether for birthdays or any occasion. As always, feel free to Bartleby me.
• New Mazzy Star video! They are playing Silver Spring the Monday night before Thanksgiving, The Fillmore, $37.50, anyone? As always, feel free to Bartleby me.
• Live Ubu from 1980! Includes Thomas singing Oklahoma.

ZEN LIVING

Dick Allen

Birdsongs that sound like the steady determined tapping

of a shoemaker's hammer,

or of a sculptor making tiny ball-peen dents in a silver plate,

wake me this morning. Is it possible the world itself can be happy? The calico cat

stretches her long body out across the top of my computer monitor,

yawning, its little primitive head a cave of possibility.

And I'm ready again

to try and see accidents, the over and over patterns

of double-slit experiments a billionfold

repeated before me. If I had great patience,

I could try to count the poplar, birch and oak

leaves in their shifting welter outside my bedroom window

or the almost infinitesimal trails of thought that flash and flash

everywhere, as if decaying particles inside a bubble chamber,

windshield raindrops, lake ripples. However,

instead I go to fry some bacon, crack two eggs

into the cast-iron skillet that's even older than this house,

and on the calendar (each month another oriental fan

where the climbing solitary is dwarfed . . . or on dark blue oceans

minuscular fishing boats bob beneath gigantic waves)

X out the days, including those I've forgotten.