How Could There Be a Word for Silence?

The traditional March 7 song and sentence, this year on March 8 since I didn't remember until yesterday afternoon as I was driving to BWI to pick up Planet: David Gilmour is sixty-eight yesterday. I neither hate or love Pink Floyd and lean more towards like than dislike depending on the song though I can state experientially that me and mushrooms and Floyd didn't play well together the two times we tried thirty or so years ago, so while there's not much Floyd here, I'll celebrate Gilmour's birthday as an excellent excuse to play Kate Bush, David Gilmour playing lead guitar on the above, watch it, you'll see him.

• There's a second reason I post Kate Bush today, you'll see. Not that I need a reason to post Kate Bush.
• Seventeen contradictions and the end of Capitalism.
• Edward Snowden, tattletale: A tattletale is someone who reports "something bad or wrong" to an authority. And that is precisely what Snowden has done. He has entrusted the documents to "responsible journalists," who have adopted the rationales and methods of the States themselves. Moreover, these "responsible journalists" work together with "government stakeholders" to determine which documents may be "safely disclosed" on the basis of factors that are explained in only the vaguest and most vacuous of terms. We haven't escaped the oppression and abuses of authority: we have only added to the authorities who decide what we will be allowed to know. Before, we were concerned with oppression by the State. Now we can look forward to oppression by the State and by those "responsible journalists" who have lucked into the story of a lifetime, which they then stripped of almost all meaning and impact.
• Vladimir Putin, master satirist: Putin is a nerd, and his excesses are all classic loser fantasies: learning judo, shooting large animals, flying fighter jets, bedding gymnasts, invading sovereign states, being the tough guy – all have their place in the sociopathic pantheon of nerdy wish-fulfilment. When it comes to nerds I’ll defer to the wisdom of the American right-wing radio host and lunatic Alex Jones: Nerds are the one of the most dangerous groups in this country, because they end up running things, but they still hate everybody, because they weren’t the jocks in high school, so they play little dirty games on everybody. They use their brains to hurt people. And I’m aware of them. OK? I see you, you little rats! As ever, Alex Jones is completely correct; there’s definite malice in the intrusive new reign of the Silicon Valley dorkocrats. But at the same time, nerds are attuned to the cruel ironies of the world in a way that high-school jocks like Alex Jones and self-righteous stoner fratboys like Barack Obama will never understand. They might be vicious, but at least they have a sense of humour.
• Another bleggal suicide.
• Cultural capital doesn't pay the rent (h/t Frances): This pairing of two smart and interesting women is my first done on a volunteer basis: after the first column ran back in December, Miranda Merklein and Jessica Lawless emailed me (independently of each other) to ask if they could participate. I knew Miranda somewhat from Twitter, but Jessica not at all. Miranda requested to be paired with Jessica, in part because they’re both writers who already knew each other. Their experiences of creative performances, gender roles, teaching, and what Jessica calls below “the brick ceiling laid over our heads at every turn as we tried to build careers” make them ideal participants for the kinds of discussions I’m trying to generate in this column.

• The Boy with Spirograph Eyes! Hopefully I can buy one via mail order.
• Yes, every time I see a ZC post with that title the above Kate Bush plays in my head.
• Lordy, Serendipity be blessed. 
• The key question of bleggalgazing.
• Then and now. Tom's latest.
• Anything going on tonight?

• *!wOOt!*
• More on Robert Ashley.
• More on Robert Ashley.
• More on Robert Ashley.
• Nurse with Wound's Journey through Cheese. (h/t).
• Looking for today's poem I rediscovered this gorgeous, brilliant, heartbreaking Jane Kenyon poem. It didn't fit this post for title, though I am always astonished anew at how Kenyon's poems slay me.

YOU CAN'T WARM YOUR HANDS IN FRONT OF A BOOK BUT YOU CAN WARM YOU HOPES THERE

Fanny Howe

Feathers fluffed the ashtray bin at the bottom of the elevator. Feathers and a smeared black look littered the parking lot like mascara. A cage would glide back and let them out to merge with the other cars on La Brea. It looked as if a struggle had ended in tears between the bird and an enemy. She broke through the fear to examine it. No chicken claws, or comb, no wing, no egg. The neutrality of words like “nothing” and “silence” vibrated at her back like plastic drapes. How could there be a word for silence? A child’s lips might blow, the North wind bring snow, a few stars explode, boats rock, but whatever moved in air did not by necessity move in ears and require the word “silence” therefore. She had personally sunk to a level where she could produce thought, and only “violence” remained a problem. It was common in her circle. A bush could turn into a fire, or a face at a clap of the hand could release spit and infection. The deviants were like herself unable to control their feelings. Los Angeles for them was only hostile as a real situation during the rainy season when torrents ripped down the sides of the canyons and overnight turned them sloshy. Then they hid in underground places, carrying Must the Morgue be my Only Shelter?? signs. But the rest of the time the sort of whiteness spread out by a Southland sun kept them warm, and they could shit whenever they wanted to, in those places they had long ago staked out. My personal angel is my maid, said one to another, putting down his Rilke with a gentle smile.

Coax the Detonation from the Static

 

• Yes, a return to my most favorite color, my beloved noxzema bottle blue. Hence this post headed by this shitty blog's Theme Song!
• Planet flies in early evening! and tomorrow is United's home-opener! so there will certainly be a United post Sunday with RFK photos - and, yes, stanchion porn - not sure what else the rest of the weekend.
• Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics: The reality of the crisis is identified as neoliberalism’s aggression against the structure of class relations that was organized in the welfare state of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; and the cause of the crisis lies in the obstruction of productive capacities by the new forms capitalist command had to assume against the new figures of living labor. In other words, capitalism had to react to and block the political potentiality of post-Fordist labor.
• In which out self-proclaimed hero explodes himself, part one: Omidyar knew what he was buying when he hired Greenwald, Scahill, and the rest. He was buying a collection of journalists who would burnish his image of himself as a crusader for "privacy" and against government surveillance (although even that is very strictly limited in a manner most people appear not to grasp, as we shall see), as well as generally bolstering his PR campaign to portray himself as a "good" billionaire. He also bought one more thing: journalism that would never threaten his own interests in any way that need concern him.
• Ab hoedis me sequestra: The state grows under conservatives, and it grows under liberals. The difference is only a matter of emphasis, and frequently not even that. The truth is that these marriage traditionalists were perfectly content with state intervention in and support of their sacred institution when it hewed, more or less, to their membership requirements. Only when a bit of money and a bit of politicking rendered it a bit less restrictive, only then did those same agencies of the state become dangerous and a touch tyrannical.
• Why he blogs: For seven-and-one-third years this blog has weighed on my brain like a digital nightmare. Apart from a six month break in 2007 and 18 months 2011-12, I've been writing or thinking about writing content. Even when I took a leave of absence words, phrases, screeds of 500 words or more often tangoed across my eyeballs when the shutters came down at night. As our minds have allowed social media technologies to colonise and structure our perceptions - how many times have you thought of a real-life in terms of an instagram snap or a sharply-observed tweet? - so mine finds half-digested ideas immediately suited to bloggable form.
• The steampunk future revisited, or: more bleggalgazing: One of the things I’ve noticed repeatedly, over the nearly eight years I’ve been writing this blog, is that I’m the last person to ask which of these weekly essays is most likely to find an audience or hit a nerve. Posts I think will be met with a shrug of the shoulders stir up a storm of protest, while those I expect to be controversial get calm approval instead. Nor do I find it any easier to guess which posts will have readers once the next week rolls around and a new essay goes up.
• Have I ever mentioned I love Archers of Loaf?

• It's true.
• Here's today's monologue: Last weekend a systems fuck-up at eNom, who I pay for my domain name via Blooger, made any website with an eNom domain name someone tried to view via Comcast internet serviece unviewable, with language in the can't load page suggesting the website had been disappeared. I only found out about this through twitter after the matter had been resolved, but I sat on my sofa and didn't fucking freak out when this shitty blog wouldn't load. I consider this progress, especially when remembering back to the domain name clusterfuck of this past summer. I created both a now dead Wordpress blog and now abandoned Blooger back-up blog in panicked reaction. I'm not sparing you why this development delights me and what it signifies when I say I've not liked anything I've written about it. I'm less incoherent than I was when I wrote a similar sentence a week or so ago if only because now I know I need to know what I want to do if I want to change the mission statement.
• This is the 1503rd post since moving here from the typepad site three and a half years ago.
• The Inaesthetic, II: In other words: The sanctioned suspension of the standard protocols, but only for this occasion. Because the project -- no matter how noble (only connect!) its intentions -- is vastly subsumed by the context in which it appears, the same institution and hierarchies hold. Sure, this time you're allowed to touch the art, even "be a part of it"; but you're still in the same setting where normally there’d be someone there to remind you not to touch or lean in too closely when looking at the art, or to ask you to please pipe down if you get a little too heated while talking about what you’re looking at, as you can expect will be the case next time you visit. 
• Purple Line! 
• Why kits will suck at this summer's World Cup: England will not wear their traditional kit at this summer's World Cup after bowing to demands from FIFA, reports the Daily Mirror. The Zurich bureaucrats have urged nations to wear a single-coloured kit to improve the quality of HD pictures from Brazil meaning that England will wear white, not blue shorts with their white shirts when they run out in Manaus, Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte. Brazil are believed to be sticking with their yellow shirt and blue shorts combination, but Germany have already caved in and they unveiled their all-white kit last month. Spain will be all-red, Italy all blue and Portugal all monotone as well.
• More people have said they liked the old new look (the grey static) than have said they disliked the old new look, though those who dislike it hate it more than those who like it like it. Long-timers can vouch this shitty blog ain't a fucking democracy. 
• PERU UBU NEWS! David Thomas on the album in progress: Assume, for the sake of this explanation, that Pere Ubu refocused rock music in the 70s. In the alternate universe that yields the new album, ‘Carnival of Souls,’ Pere Ubu refocused progressive music instead. Before I began, I listened to ‘Pawn Hearts’ on endless repeat for nearly 2 weeks, every waking moment. The album doesn’t sound anything like VDGG and it’s likely no one will ever make the connection but it’s there. Keith is also a huge fan of 70s prog, so that had been in my mind as well. Something to make him happy. Along the way I determined that I wanted to synthesize Kraftwerk and Suicide into one band, one methodology and one sound. I wanted to work with a balance of digital and analog sound, confusing the boundaries. I had the notion of turning the band into a synthesizer, a machine comprised of human beings but with a Midwest personality.
• Bleggalgaze: yes, the bleggal diddling can legitimately be considered a bleggal mid-life crisis, though with the return of noxzema blue I think the major diddling will stop for a while.
• And have more Archers of Loaf, dammit, it's been a while.

THE PLANET KRYPTON

Lynn Emanuel

Outside the window the McGill smelter

sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper,   

on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared   

into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull

and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim,   

while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax   

the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas   

Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound

of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm

of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted,   

when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted   

up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length;

it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy.   

The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire

of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils   

of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every

branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet   

of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine.   

Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas,

my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy,

glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton.   

In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were

not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility   

uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports.

A new planet bloomed above us; in its light

the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.

The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;   

we could have anything we wanted.

Riptide of Rhythms and the Metaphor’s Seaweed

Spent another night last night with Jack Spicer's poems, here, I'm glad some of you enjoy hearing the poems rather than reading them. Then I listened to The Marshmallow Staircase.

Hardly any links to fish even if I had gone link fishing. Plus it's not Mark E Smith's birthday today so my internal bleg rules demand I move yesterday's birthday post down from top. Plus I like the new header, want to bump it. So this. Aggregating back tomorrow, or not.

The Russian Maid Revealed She Was Not a Citizen of New York State but Had Slipped in on an Ukrainian Crate, or: Born Fifty-Seven Years Ago Today

Mark E Smith is 57 today. The Fall is in the second circle of acts that rotate in and out of the two non-permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game. I'd tell you to click the The Fall tag below but most of the youtubes posted in the past are gone, claimed by the rights holder, and fuck that. Requests, sent with link to active music, will be added, the next two requested by Wayne, thanks! Yes, the post title makes me smile, it's from the bottom song.

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Some Multibody Hid His Second Exoneural Projecto-Self in a Pocket of Subspace, Masking It Over with Molecules of Landscape-Sim

• Three more Ashley pieces.
• Rebumping In Memory of Robert Ashley.
• Rebumping Ashley's Ubuweb page.
• Rebumping Imperfect News but Art in All Directions.
• Kyle Gann remembers Ashley.

• Remember to give to WFMU during their marathon, widget over in left column. Do it for me.
• I'm reminded that during Big News Spasms - Ukraine in this instance - Blegsylvania, at least my Stringtown in Blegsylvania, slows up. It no longer surprises me - people go to their usual and favorite big sources to keep up with latest news/assimilate their tribe's common wisdom on the event. 
• How the internet is narrowing our minds: As our options have grown, so has the overwhelming dominance of a generic set of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Mainstream culture, aided and abetted (or thwarted and warped) by the frenetic pace of the Internet, has fallen into a punishing pattern: a few books—the ones that win prizes, are heavily promoted, or feature at least one vampire—rake in all the media attention and readers. All others are flops. In the book economy, the middle class is dying. The idea of an eHarmony for books is similarly a way of narrowing choices in the face of an overwhelming field of options. Paradoxically, because personalization relies on shared categories, its results can flatten the real differences between individuals.
• Food links.
• Belward Farm!
• Delmore Schwartz, for those of you who do.
• Philip Roth, for those of you who do.
• Thanks to Hamster for the above and below links plus for finding me the Ashley vimeo page.
• Berio, for those of you who do.
• Alex Chilton, for those of you who do.
• UPDATE! Yes yes yes, I know it's Mark E Smith's birthday today, a The Fall cascade is already in the can, will be posted later this afternoon.

DOOZEY

Albert Goldbarth

"A bun in her oven? Geez Louise, isn't that
malarkey? Estelle? Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?"
      "I thought it was bunkum too,
when I heard it. Really: you coulda knocked me
for a loop. But Alice told me, and she's jake."
Alice: the provenance, the gatekeeper. So it wasn't all hooey.
It was the real goods. Aunt Ruby
hadn't shown up for her visit last month and,
well, Estelle was in a pickle, was between the proverbial
rock and its cousin the hard place, friendless,
paddleless up that famous defecatory creek and down
in the dumps, and while vernacular studies

isn't my speed, I love the way we used to talk.
We also used to say the autumn light is lambent
on the lake top, and the waves display a heraldic curl
as in halcyon days . . . and that was also a fine,
fine thing to say. Or that some multibody hid
his second exoneural projecto-self in a pocket of subspace,
masking it over with molecules of landscape-sim
. . . that's how they talk in sci-fi-ville, while over
in the empirical records of science, someone is saying
the reagent deliquesces although
in its previous state it underwent resorption. All
of the languages are appropriate to their purposes—are

fine. Jack Gilbert's poem in honor of wabi
—that's the Japanese word for, roughly,
finding a beauty in ruin that one can only
find in ruin—reminds us that to lack the word
for a concept is really to lack the concept.
Let the word occur, though, and then suddenly
in a fingersnap, in a trice, and like a bolt out of the blue,
I can see my friend for whom Estelle is an avatar
in stanza one, and the formerly unacknowledged
stores of dignity and perseverance
that carried her through the shame of the abortion
—her wabi—flower forth. One story goes
 

she fucked up big-time, Mick was a saint but
nooo, she had to get knocked up by an asshole
like Kenny. Another story: her mind is part dissociative, and
so requires positive reinforcement from multiple sources.
Actually they're the same story, only told in different languages.
Or actually because they're different languages, they're
different stories. In mine, she's just returned
from the doctor, and needs to tell Mick. She's sitting
surrounded by thousands of happy memories—the light
through the louvers is lambent—but we all know
how the story goes: life is jim-dandy, a peacheroo, then
words get spoken, and overnight the whole world goes kablooey.

My Relationship with Frog Sounds

The River Deepens When It Gets Down to the Sea the River Deepens

RIP Robert Ashley.

Biblioklept (who tweeted the news) has some pieces up at his joint.

In memory of Robert Ashley.

Ashley's Ubuweb page with LOTS of sound.

Imperfect news but Art in All Directions.

I've posted some but never tagged him, my apologies, the tag below will only take you here, I'll try and find earlier posts for tomorrow. Sorry also for the goofy youtube below, I wanted this piece and this is all I could find. Lots more tomorrow.



 

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The Is One Language Not Called Money and the Other Not Called Explosions

• Was going to add these links to yesterday's mostly unread post - it was a weekend day in Blegsylvania, what with the East Coast snow - but fuck that. Lots of good reads there. And with a weekend day in Blegsylvania, link paucity abounds, so not many linkages today. Also too, fuck it, the inching closer.
• The Intercept: notes on media, capitalism, imperialism.
• Motherfuckers.
• On the wrong side of history.
• New MOCO animal shelter. Go rescue the best decision you'll ever make.
• Locating the "heart" of Bethesda.
• Black metal is sublime.
• Roubard interview, for those of you who do. I'm gonna try Great Fire of London again, I was not in the right frame of mind when I tried before.
• Hejinian essay: The End of Closure.
• Can't say I fell asleep listening to Renaldo and the Loaf, but I did hear a song of theirs this morning. Which reminds me I haven't played any Residents here in a long time.

THE UNRULY CHILD

Bob Perelman

There is a company called Marathon Oil, mother,

Very far away and very big and, again, very

Desirable. Who isn’t? Back connecting pure dots,

Fleecy intelligence lapped in explanatory sound

The faces make difficult.

Learn the language.

That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation:

My mind, up close, in pjs, and I use it.

Wanting to fuck an abstraction nine times in a row,

Continuous melismata, don’t stop, don’t stop, no name, no picture.

There is a series of solids, mother,

Called people, who rise to the transparent obtainable

Solo windows, mornings, afternoons,

And there are military operations called

Operation Patio, Operation Menu.

It is the individuals who finally get the feel of the tenses.

So that it may snow, has to snow on the muddy corpse.

There is a boundary, mother, very far away and very

Continuous, broken, to interrogate civilians, the self,

The text, networks of viewers found wanting a new way

To cook chicken, why not?, to kill while falling asleep.

There is the one language not called money, and the other not called explosions.

"Enough" Can Get Bigger

• Another motherfucking snow day. And I've discovered, at least the past few days, I've reengaged the motherfuckering. Have some motherfucking (and non-motherfucking) reads.
• Thought of Cale's Mercenaries (Ready for War) last night and as a consequence today is a Cale Day. Is good thing.
• The End of American Exceptionalism? As America and Europe have changed over time, so have the attributes that exceptionalists claim distinguish us from them. But for the contemporary Right, there are basically three: our belief in organized religion; our belief that America has a special mission to spread freedom in the world; and our belief that we are a classless society where, through limited government and free enterprise, anyone can get ahead. Unfortunately for conservatives, each of these beliefs is declining fast.
• On the above: Beinart is right that in some ways the conservative tide has undermined elements of that exceptionalism. The politicization of churches by the Religious Right has created blow-back on organized religion. The rush to release the rich from social responsibilities and the reluctance to help average Americans cope with economic misfortune has disillusioned more Americans about the national premise that hard work will get you ahead. [9] But the conservative tide has also entailed a wave of messaging to reinforce the elements of American exceptionalism: the strong ideological campaign to insist on an “I’ve got mine, Jack” outlook; the rise of explicit libertarian philosophy and practical off-shoots like gun-carry laws; and the attack on government at all levels. There is, also, as others have noted, the way that conservative forces have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in Washington: making government dysfunctional.
• I've yodeled for years that the US is ten years behind Britain which is ten years behind Greece. Here's the short version of a another old and related yodel and whine: My father is first generation American, my mother second, both born of Eastern European immigrants. My dad grew up in a company coal town in Appalachian Pennsylvania, my mom in a town up the hill from Donora's steel mills; she was 14 years old and two miles away from the Smog). My parents got me and my brother the FUCK out of ghost town Pennsylvania, I'm healthy, happy, middle-upper-middle middle class, comfortable, not worried about food, shelter, concerned about blog pings. My daughter will be my age, 54, in 2047. What world is my generation leaving her?

• I find this utterly believable, so much so it was my first lurch: Western leaders are stunned because they haven’t realized Russia’s owners no longer respect Europeans the way they once did after the Cold War. Russia thinks the West is no longer a crusading alliance. Russia thinks the West is now all about the money. Putin’s henchmen know this personally. Russia’s rulers have been buying up Europe for years. They have mansions and luxury flats from London’s West End to France’s Cote d’Azure. Their children are safe at British boarding and Swiss finishing schools. And their money is squirrelled away in Austrian banks and British tax havens.
• Oligarchs triumphant: So here we are. Chaos, strife, the threat of war -- and the heavy smoke of ignorance covering it all. Sleepwalking once more toward disaster. Deliberately setting tumultuous events in motion without the slightest concern for their ultimate consequences, or the suffering they will cause, now and perhaps for generations to come. (Think of Iraq, for example, or the spread of violence and chaos that has already flowed to many countries from the intervention in Libya's internal affairs.) But why are we here? Greed. Greed and the lust for dominance. Let's not say "power," for that word carries positive connotations, and can also include an element of responsibility.  But the oligarchs and ideologues, the militarists and ministers involved in this episode of Great Gamesmanship don't want power in any broader, deeper sense. What they want is dominance, to lord it over others -- physically, financially, psychologically. Among those at the top in this situation, on every side, there is not the slightest regard for the common good of their fellow human beings -- not even for those with whom they share some association by the accident of history or geography: language, nationality, ethnicity. The lust for loot and dominance outweighs all the rest, regardless of the heavy piety oozing from the rhetoric on all sides.
• Crimea, Foucault, why sport is bullshit: In the end, this whole mess can be blamed on the Sochi Winter Olympics. It’s a well-known and boring fact that in ancient Greece, wars were put on hold for the duration of the Games. The idea of doing the same thing now isn’t just infeasible but nonsensical; war and the Olympics are one and the same thing. Host governments treat the Games in much the same way that they treat foreign wars: they provide a chance to issue some contracts and boost important industries, they let you redraw the maps (turning a beach town into a mountain resort, or a moulding industrial park into a germ for gentrification), they’re a matter of national pride and a propaganda vehicle that helps calm internal contradictions – but at the same time they never seem to deliver the profits they promise; the costs inevitably spiral, and afterwards they tend to leave cities full of half-ruined buildings. It’s not just a matter of resemblance. With their vast crowds and attending dignitaries they’re a deliberate target for terrorists, allowing the hosts to show off their various defence technologies to the world. London 2012 wasn’t much more than an enormous arms fair, with an aircraft carrier on the Thames and missile batteries on the roofs of homes. Russia in particular seems to like conducting its imperial adventures during the Games. While jets battered Stalin’s birthplace in Georgia, representatives from the two countries were playing beach volleyball in Beijing. The Ukrainian paralympic team is still in Sochi. All this isn’t a distraction from the sport; it’s another facet of the same phenomenon.
• See, I don't seek to end the motherfucking because I hate the motherfuckering, I seek to end the motherfuckering because I love the motherfuckering to the obsesssion of excluding much non-motherfuckering. Hence the debut of a new tag.
• Self-portrait in a convex mirror.
• This week in water.
• My country is the world.
• Szymborska!
• Prunella's latest playlist.

THE FORMS OF RESISTANCE

Emily Berry

Is this mountain all rock, or are there any villages on it?

These are some of the things I said to her.

We bake because it is a way of overcoming.

In the journey of zest, I see myself.

On the news every day people are standing up screaming

or lying down screaming while others remain calm.

She pointed out that I had not made eye contact

with her at all. Then I cried properly in a short burst.

This is the worst example of any circumstance ever,

noted a journalist in his notebook.

Let butter and chocolate be a wish not to die!

I implored the bain-marie. She likened me to a sieve.

I clutch all my poems to my chest and count them

again and again. I am kneeling like a small dog.

What’s going on with this modern world

and the right wife not even knowing

what the left wife is doing? Now all you have to do

is cut off the legs. After an absence, after a hard task,

after the way the hand turns, like this —

There was so much I couldn’t contain.

She asked me how I was feeling in my body

at this moment; I said tense in my whole trunk area.

A strong smell of white wine. She said it came from

an impulse that she often used to have when she first

started practicing. She said she believed feelings

are held in the body. She asked me what was going on

with my breath and I realized I was sort of holding it.

Like the boxes in the cupboard. “Enough” can get bigger.

How much bigger, though? When I say

I’ve had enough, how will you know when to stop?

Your Reputation for Saying Things of Interest Will Not Be Marred if You Hasten to Other Topics

• I'm glad to hear some of you dug the Wilbur. Have more.
• I confess, I haven't paid the attention to the Ukrainian clusterfuck as once I would have. If you have time and interest, tell me please, is this a relatively accurate assessment vis a vis the source, The New York Review of Books? I mean to say, as a thirty-five year subscriber to NYRB, I understand its biases - they were once, in most cases, still, in some cases, my biases.
• Reichstag fire in Kiev.
• Not a Reichstag fire in Kiev.
• Sorta amazing, reading the above two, to note what the NYRB article leaves out, yes?
• Khlam!
• I was asked by L this past Tuesday Night Pints what part of my disengagement from motherfuckering is my growing conflict aversion. Somewhere between lots and not at all. The cost/benefit of not motherfuckering the old motherfuckers is - in my case - a growing lack of interest in motherfuckering anything at all.
• Having said that, fuck the motherfucking Oscars.
• On the importance of keeping investors out of the newsroom.
• The cryptopolitics of cryptocurrency.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Stravinsky, for those of you who do.

LYING

Richard Wilbur

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,

When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.

Your reputation for saying things of interest

Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,

Nor will the delicate web of human trust

Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.

Later, however, talking with toxic zest

Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it

Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,

You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing

Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.

Not that the world is tiresome in itself:

We know what boredom is: it is a dull

Impatience or a fierce velleity,

A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,

To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,

We invent nothing, merely bearing witness

To what each morning brings again to light:

Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment

Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law

Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,

Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town

In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck

Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones

Beginning now to tug their shadows in

And track the air with glitter. All these things

Are there before us; there before we look

Or fail to look; there to be seen or not

By us, as by the bee’s twelve thousand eyes,

According to our means and purposes.

So too with strangeness not to be ignored,

Total eclipse or snow upon the rose,

And so with that most rare conception, nothing.

What is it, after all, but something missed?

It is the water of a dried-up well

Gone to assail the cliffs of Labrador.

There is what galled the arch-negator, sprung

From Hell to probe with intellectual sight

The cells and heavens of a given world

Which he could take but as another prison:

Small wonder that, pretending not to be,

He drifted through the bar-like boles of Eden

In a black mist low creeping, dragging down

And darkening with moody self-absorption

What, when he left it, lifted and, if seen

From the sun’s vantage, seethed with vaulting hues.

Closer to making than the deftest fraud

Is seeing how the catbird’s tail was made

To counterpoise, on the mock-orange spray,

Its light, up-tilted spine; or, lighter still,

How the shucked tunic of an onion, brushed

To one side on a backlit chopping-board

And rocked by trifling currents, prints and prints

Its bright, ribbed shadow like a flapping sail.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened:

The eye mists over, basil hints of clove,

The river glazes toward the dam and spills

To the drubbed rocks below its crashing cullet,

And in the barnyard near the sawdust-pile

Some great thing is tormented. Either it is

A tarp torn loose and in the groaning wind

Now puffed, now flattened, or a hip-shot beast

Which tries again, and once again, to rise.

What, though for pain there is no other word,

Finds pleasure in the cruellest simile?

It is something in us like the catbird’s song

From neighbor bushes in the grey of morning

That, harsh or sweet, and of its own accord,

Proclaims its many kin. It is a chant

Of the first springs, and it is tributary

To the great lies told with the eyes half-shut

That have the truth in view: the tale of Chiron

Who, with sage head, wild heart, and planted hoof

Instructed brute Achilles in the lyre,

Or of the garden where we first mislaid

Simplicity of wish and will, forgetting

Out of what cognate splendor all things came

To take their scattering names; and nonetheless

That matter of a baggage-train surprised

By a few Gascons in the Pyrenees

Which, having worked three centuries and more

In the dark caves of France, poured out at last

The blood of Roland, who to Charles his king

And to the dove that hatched the dove-tailed world

Was faithful unto death, and shamed the Devil.