I don't think anyone holds me to the promises I make here except me (I don't think anyone pays any attention to the promises I make here except me), but I promised a Dischord cascade a couple of weeks ago, I didn't forget, I got pushed in different directions, here it is.
- I also promise myself I'll post on days I know are the least busy days in Blegsylvania, so here this is.
- Focus: There is much more to discuss in the architecture of fear; the poetics of space that Bachelard didn’t realize I don’t think. Perhaps its more the de-poeticizing of space. But that is, I trust, next post. For now, there are clearly tendencies at work in how public space is being militarized. The city as war zone. The gated rich at at command headquaters, where foot soldiers guard the aristocracy. Class segregation is an open concept, now, and increasingly expressed nonchalantly. Narrative must find resistance through new strategies that will express the clarity, for the low grade resolution of CCTV image is reflected in the blurred babblings of much of what passes for journalism and thinking today. The language of piercing limpid transparancy is ever harder to find. A lack of focus, in thought, in architecture, in narrative. The CCTV age.
- Ceravolo, moneylenders, Super Bowl 48.
- The rejection of shame.
- Mr Charlie meets Mr Chomsky.
- Martin O'Malley says Fuck Your Hillarian Inevitability. The governor of my state is a funny man.
- { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
- The activity of writing.
- Milosz's Incantation.
WORMS AND US
Rachel Wetzsteon
Maggots in the food, maggots in the floorboards,
maggots in the recurring nightmare in which,
lying down with a rugged adonis,
I wake to find him almost nibbled away.
Certainly signs of death are everywhere,
but love is more than combat with worms
and cannot be so glibly explained away;
I do not tremble or knock my knees
to keep the maggots slumbering below ground,
or crush them underfoot by flocking to
everything they are not: raucous gatherings,
stolen kisses. On the contrary,
I come away from parties adoring
what is wormlike in them: the unrisen soufflé,
the precocious boy’s octogenarian sayings,
the drooping lids of the hostess, someone’s
death rattle of a laugh. Certainly love has
commerce with vermin, but it is a friendly
partnership, not a league of discord;
a hacking cough gives proof of a full life,
a passing stranger seems all the stronger
when one foot is sinking quietly into the grave.
II.
But is is this lingering horror of dust
that makes me pull us out of the cold earth
any way I know how: because I strive
for heaven in little rooms, visit you
in order to suck your blood, then spread it
over pipes and daffodils, and shove you
up to the vacant sky, where you hover
like a stone-cold, tedious statue who never dies,
you, poor pawn, are a jack-in-the-box gone haywire,
and I am a grinning humanist with bad dreams.
