Monday, July 25, 2016

What Is Attested Is Attested To





Thurston Moore is 58 today.

The manic clusterfuck blogging:.see previous two posts. As always, part of the mania is proxying what in real life is driving the proxying. As always, the mania is silly and exhilerating unto exhausting. As always a song - this one, last night, for instance, as I was thinking about Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore's birthday






or a poem, like the Ashbery below, breaks the up and I feel naked and stupid. Lordy, that song, both Sonic Youth's cover and The Carpenters original, still gives me chills each time. As always the mania is bipolor, and this cycle's downhill has begun. I blame Putin.

Thanks to my friend Shahar for Original Silence (Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Thurston Moore, Paul Nielson-Love, Jim O'Rourke, Massimo Pupillo)! and the other (not Superstar) Sonic Youth songs too!








ON SEEING AN OLD COPY OF VOGUE ON A CHAIR

John Ashbery

For all I know I was meant to be one of those marchers
into a microtonal near-future whose pile has worn away—
the others, whose drab histrionics provoke unease to this day,
so fair, so calm, a gift from cartoon characters I loved.
Alas, the happy ending and the tragic are alike doomed;
better to enter where the door is held open for you
with scarcely a soupçon of complaint, like salt in stew
or polite booing at a concert he took you to.

No longer shall the grasses weave quilts for our revenge
of lying down on, or a faint breeze stir milady’s bangs.
What is attested is attested to. To flirt with other thangs,
peacockish, would scare the road away.

Frogs give notice when the swamp backs up, and butterflies
aren’t obliged to stay longer than they do.
Look, they’re already gone!
And somewhere, somebody’s breakfast is on exhibit.




1 comment:

  1. ashbery's poem speaks of frogs, and i quoted a poem about a frog in a comment at fafblog's last posting. nearly five years ago now, which was a drawing of a frog and a toad sitting in a tree reading

    http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6233/6325539619_32b86c4166.jpg

    at that time i wrote

    The picture reminds me of a poem, sometimes recited by my late father of blessed memory, even in the last years of his long life. He learned it in the early part of the twentieth century, as a Canadian schoolboy. It appears in the 1909 edition of The Ontario Readers Second Book. I regret that I have been unable to find any more information about the poem or the author. You will note that, unlike the frogs in the drawing here, the frog in the poem had never read anything. Some learn from the experience of others, while others can draw conclusions only from events they encounter themselves.


    The Daring Froggie
    -- by James Clarence Hawer --


    Once upon a time
    On the border of a brook,
    A wicked little froggie,
    Who had never read a book --

    Who had never read a story,
    Or a funny little rhyme,
    Had a sad and tragic ending,
    Once upon a time.

    This little froggie, sad to say,
    Was very fond of flies,
    And thought on this unlucky day
    That he had found a prize.

    "Up, up I go," said Froggie,
    "I can climb as well as hop;
    I only hope he'll stay right there
    Until I reach the top."

    "I wish this wouldn't bend so much."
    Said Froggie, going higher;
    "I wish that flies would shut their eyes
    And come a little nigher.

    But he is such a good one
    And he looks so very fine,
    I think I must have him,
    For it's time for me to dine."

    So up he went regardless
    Of the danger he was in;
    He saw a duck below him,
    But he didn't care a pin;

    Till suddenly behind his back
    The reed began to crack.
    And all he heard was just one word --
    And that one word was "Quack!"



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