Monday, September 25, 2023

Don't Hint of Dark Birds Moving Overhead

Most of monologue in grid per increasingly normal, I was pooting at Shitlord Paid Pooter pooting that John Fetterman dresses like a slob in a House of Decorum, paid pooter pooting that Fetterman's hoodies a direct symptom and sign of civilization's downfall, far far worse than gross corruption and incitement to insurrection, and I typed this motherfucking sentence, just like our shitlords wanted me to



Trying to teach myself black, watercolor ink in the above's case, I can't show you the more successful one because it's a 12 x 12 canvas that won't fit on the scanner I use to pdf these before jaypegging them for here and there and even if I had a big enough scanner bed if I turned the 12 x 12 upside down the already crumbling layered gouache would fall off, today in fine jeffmetaphors abounding, I've mentioned this before

I need an expensive top of the line overhead scanner with a bed of at least 16 x 16, I'm starting a gofuck me, will accept payments from all the shitlords' online payment services (I pay for my brainwashing) here, this one's a 6x6 with no black watercolor ink, me and yellow and pink, sheesh, and then what is it with me and circles beyond I can't draw?



What is being held up as a dangerous burden is, in fact, a wonderful opportunity for the m***********g Democrats
Once again on the Democratic Party, the lesser evil, and the working-class Left
Maybe someone who writes about voter suppression has said this but calling people who you DON'T want to vote repeatedly and incessantly IS a voter suppresion tactic seems to me
Mohammed bin Salman says he will ‘continue doing sport washing’ for Saudi Arabia
How Not to Launch a Global Anti-Censorship Movement
Russell Brand is not the main target, but a mere proxy for the censors' global assault on free speech
I confess, I know nothing about Russell Brand other than I've seen his name for years and investigated no further, it's entirely possible he's a creepy asshole, but here's a vital reminder: one of the key purposes our shitlords have in enabling and then censoring creepy assholes and especially asshole crackers is to set up and justify the upcoming censoring of YOU
The Palestinian Panopticon
How to Hide a $2 Trillion Antitrust Trial
CAN WE TALK TO WHALES?
Junior Varsity Washington Post pooter pooting the Fetterman, fart
The loss of the Senate dress code is the downfall of civilization
Senior Varsity Washington Post pooter pooting the Fetterman, fart
I am not convinced (yet) that Fetterman is an honest broker and have no idea (yet) whether he's smart and savvy and is working the hoodie schtick for more than attention and really IS trying to piss off anyturd who's anyturd, but good on him calling for Menendez to resign (as I type this no other Motherfucking Democratic Senator has, nor Biden, who's busy preparing for his Tuesday cosplay as pro-union in a UAW picket line)
Worm that jumps from rats to slugs to human brains has invaded Southeast US
HEY! Here's your opportunity, you sadistic turd, to trap, torture, torment, terrorize, and kill sentient creatures!
Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics
Psycho-PoliticsFRESH HELL
Destroying a Child’s Love of Reading—and Their Life
The ghost forests of Maryland'sEastern Shore
Avedon Carol's occasional links
NATO Keeps Saying Things NATO Doesn’t Let You Say
How the Government Is Removing Our Right to Read in Private
Christopher Rufo and the End of Public Education
CLEOCID PANIER7 Vegan Sandwiches!
Medieval Pet Names!Maggie's
Animals talking{ feuilleton }'s weekly
It was only a matter of time before the Koch brothers showed up in this storyMoth magic
Mocos, have any of you EVER eaten at Il Pizzico, I've driven by it hundreds, thousands of time over the years, I know it yelp and I know people are dopes, but Best Moco Restaurant (for years and running)
One of the novels I've failed in 2023On Fosse's Septology
Robert Pollard interview: 40 years of GbV
Youngsters, The Mats were, back in the Paleozoic, deemed a big deal, great albums, shitty shows, laugh
If, like me, you want a weekly dose of Death Metal I can't recommend enough Land Phil's *Anti-Music Club*






TORCH GALLERY: JOAN OF ARC

Mary Syzbist

The sculptures in this gallery have been                        

carefully treated with a protective wax                         
so that visitors may touch them.                                     

exhibitions, the art institute

of chicago

Stone soldier, it's okay now.
I've removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.

I'm allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.

Nothing peels from you.

Your skin gleams like the silver earrings
you do not wear.

Above you, museum windows gleam October.
Above you, high gold leaves flinch in the garden,

but the flat immovable leaves entwined in your hair to crown you
go through what my fingers can't.
I want you to have a mind I can turn in my hands.

You have a smooth and upturned chin,
cold cheeks, unbruisable eyes,
and hair as grooved as fig skin.

It's October, but it's not October
behind your ears, which don't hint
of dark birds moving overhead,
or of the blush and canary leaves

emptying themselves
in slow spasms
into shallow hedgerows.

Still bride of your own armor,
bride of your own blind eyes,
this isn't an appeal.

If I could I would let your hair down
and make your ears disappear.

Your head at my shoulder, my fingers on your lips—

as if the cool of your stone curls were the cool
               of an evening—
as if you were about to eat salt from my hand.

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

You Should Write Down Your Dreams Then Destroy What You Wrote

When I was ten or eleven I discovered the trick of randomly opening a novel I'm about to start somewhere near the middle and reading a paragraph out of context so that when I come across it in the normal course of the novel a wave of deja vu washes over me (L can vouch that I do this since I taught her the trick early in our relationship and she still does this also to this day). It's worked twice this calendar year, both Cormac McCarthy novels, the new one, *The Passenger,* and later *Suttree.* I started the trick on at least two dozen other novels this year but failed each and every one of them long before I encountered the random paragraph




I like to blame my eyes rather than me for my downhill inability to read much less engage a novel (and, uh-ohing in the distance, poetry too), and it's true my vision's much weaker than once, and my eyes tire me towards a nap after fifteen minutes of reading (I can't read in bed any more, it's hopeless), and I like to blame my age (and Summer past's covid) for my diminished and foggier by the day memory, and I like to blame the clusterfuckers for my self-protective reduction in overall damn towards all but me and mine, and all deserve their proportions of blame in my resistance to and simmering ambivalence towards reading, but I recognize the same symptoms towards the typed word I felt when I lost any and all urge to watch moving images on a screen twenty years ago when my eyes were good and I was young, a complete evaporation of desire to sit and watch, which is all that reading feels like to me now





Music has never sounded better to me. I still write in journal everyday, look forward to it. I hike with L every chance I get. I changed my disc bag to all DX plastic all less than 165 grams and tweaked my mechanics (it only took 25 years to figure out this basic trick to increasing body torque) and am determined to play at least once a week (Seneca, in the pouring rain with Dr Z this past Sunday, front nine 29, middle nine 30, back nine 27, pins mixed, never done that before). I think about any one painting I make more than I ever did a poem I made. I will finish *In Search of Lost Time* (the only thing I want to read right now though in fits and starts, I'm almost through "Guermantes Way," I like to blame Proust for my inability to read anyone else (but McCarthy, though I'm so done with him now)). I am not unhappy, in fact now and then I'm happy, how can I stop feeling an utter complete moral failure I not only can't finish novels now, I don't even want to start them?



Click through, it has a bad word in the title but is great song
How the United States Became a Leading Exporter of White Supremacist Terrorism
The political rise of a new white nationalism
Trump’s Rosh Hashanah message manages the unimaginable
DeSantis Won’t Hesitate to Race Trump to the Bottom
Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On
Today in Rhetorical Questions! Why Is It So Hard for Victims of Police Abuse To Get Justice?
A few thoughts on the Russell Brand furore
Counterpoint: more thoughts on the above
Adding, it is entirely possible and almost certainly probable that Brand is a disgusting creep AND that the campaign against him is meant to shut him up and shut him down
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL
Would A Chainsaw-Wielding President Be So Bad?
This Is Your Hospital System On Covid and Privatization
We've Been Misreading a Major Law of Physics For The Past 300 Years
I used to work at Dock of the Bay 40+ years ago when it was actually a crab shack, laugh
Flowerville: the formative years{ feuilleton}'s weekly links





THE RESCUE

Ben Lerner

You are afraid to be touched because
and that’s a reasonable fear, a woman once
brushed past me in the aisle
or stairs, I’ve repressed the encounter
in amber, she said, and I was destroyed
And in the second dream she was holding the dog
back from a mourning dove and over us
the sky had what I can only describe as
exposed beams, and she said if he does
get a bird, a squirrel, he doesn’t snap the neck
or worry it, just stares at me because
holds it in the mouth, the tension between
what he has been taught and what he feels
and the word for that gap is

The vain travail. It’s the one poem I’ve
by heart, she said, the way the magician
the way the uncle finds the coin in your ear
or you’ve been holding the card this whole time
She can make you feel like a missing
word, she can smooth back your hair
and say there is all this new research about
influence, how you need to be influenced by me
In the third dream, your daughter brings
an offering in her jaws to the bed
You should be in analysis or volunteer more
You are afraid to be touched because
at the shelter. Fourth dream, fifth dream
something happened you can’t remember

until you recite it, they say “by heart”
but it’s actually lodged
here, she said, touching my neck
above the collar, and here and here
Because you are the dog and the dove
Lady and hart, the patron and system
of patronage, the tension between
us could be useful for your work, could hold
you back from the mourning
until the poem goes amber in the mouth
and speech floweth over the stone, end quote
You should write down your dreams
then destroy what you wrote, interesting
use of “exposed”

Friday, September 15, 2023

I Want to Learn the Faith of the Indifferent

Some relatively minor shitlordturd got caught on hot mic saying the quiet part out loud, shitlords would make you eat catfood if they could and they're trying, he promises they're trying, and people go, omfg! who'd a thunk it? This guy for one



Where my eyes and memory and concentration have delivered me: I'm alternating a new translation of Fyodor's *Brothers Karamazov* and George's *Mill on the Floss,* today a *Mill on the Floss* day, I love George except when she writes dialogue in 19th century bumpkin English, the fuck am I reading a christo-fascist Russian writing about the soul in Czarist Russia and a progressive too ensconsed in the English class system she criticizes to realize she shouldn't write dialogue in English peasant? My eyes, memory, and concentration: I can finish a novel now without having read it so I might as well finish novels I read once with good eyes, good memory, and decent concentration, fine metaphors abound



I need access to an good overhead scanner, I lose a dimension on the flatbed I use

As easily predictable, clusterfuck spigots've been opened, not full spew yet - wait for next year, yowza - but August's armistice over - if I added to the grid below all weekend it'd be two digital feet long, here, have what I've gathered since last grid, I'm off to disc today, tomorrow, and hike on Sunday, o! listen to this, loud, especially the last three minutes and thirty second, holyfuck





Capitalist technology ‘eliminates the possibilities of imagining a completely different lifestyle'
What happened to the Left in the U.S. labor movement?
Mental illness and capitalism
Homo Sapiens Are Working Overtime to Join ‘The Great Silence
Report: Some Group Called ‘Dads For America’ Currently Running Over Your Kid’s Teacher With A Car
Top Dems Press Supreme Court To Block Billionaire Tax
WaPo's CIA stenographer tells Uncle Joe not to run in 2024
The Walls Are Closing in on Joe Biden
Oceania Has Always Been at War with Democracy
The Most Wall Street Journal Op-Ed In The History Of Wall Street Journal Op-Eds
The Jacksonville Shooting and the Far Right
Too much of not a lotWestern Pravdas
He's so sorry he thought h could be an artist. He was obviously mistaken and should have figured this out sooner
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
Change your lifeIn the dark
Popular and Generational Shifts in Cultural Capital
Debts and Gifts from Wallace and Lethem
Poems to Wake the Corpses
Out of nowhere yesterday this 30 year old song I hadn't heard or thought of in 20 started playing in my head, be in yours:





TWILIGHT

Henri Cole

There's a black bear
in the apple tree
and he won't come down.
I can hear him panting,
like an athlete.
I can smell the stink
of his body.

Come down, black bear.
Can you hear me?

The mind is the most interesting thing to me;
like the sudden death of the sun,
it seems implausible that darkness will swallow it
or that anything is lost forever there,
like a black bear in a fruit tree,
gulping up sour apples
with dry sucking sounds,

or like us at the pier, somber and tired,
making food from sunlight,
you saying a word, me saying a word, trying hard,
though things were disintegrating.
Still, I wanted you,
your lips on my neck,
your postmodern sexuality.
Forlorn and anonymous:
I didn't want to be that. I could hear
the great barking monsters of the lower waters
calling me forward.

You see, my mind takes me far,
but my heart dreams of return.
Black bear,
with pale-pink tongue
at the center of his face,
is turning his head,
like the face of Christ from life.
Shaking the apple boughs,
he is stronger than I am
and seems so free of passion—
no fear, no pain, no tenderness. I want to be that.

Come down, black bear,
I want to learn the faith of the indifferent.

Monday, September 11, 2023

watching it happen without it happening to me

I have not seen a firefly all Summer. I've not seen giant brains of orange fungus growing on decaying tree trunks all summer. The woods, I'd always rather be in the woods w L, the trees are four weeks ahead of schedule towards winter dormancy



All summer L and I have been commenting on how abnormally distressed the beech trees are, we ascribed it to the bad drought (we are short ten inches of rain this year), but some of them looked sicker than just enervated and thirsty, and fuck, some of them are getting sick, if beech trees are wiped out so are Maryland woods





A tiny worm, an invasive species, will decimate all forests east of the Mississippi, we've already killed fireflys (when was the last time you saw a ladybug? a box turtle?) my constant and despairingly angry reminder that when my daughter is my age it will be 2057, what wreck of a world if the world still exists will she inhabit? Saturday's thistles, Browning Run Trail, Little Bennett




THIS IS TOTALLY BY DESIGN!
Shitlordism in the American Tradition
Fascism is the Western Answer to Class Struggle
None of the world’s worst people are in prison
THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS A SERIOUS HEADLINE PROBLEM
The Criminalization of Dissent (continued)
The Fake News about Fake News
TODAY IN MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS!
TODAY IN MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS!
TODAY IN MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS!
TODAY IN MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS!
TODAY IN MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS!
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Smarmy Is Just Another Disgusting Warmonger
Imagine thinking that elites give a flying fart about what's best for peasants
SHITLORD ECONOMICSMONEY IS POWER
A scientist manipulated climate data. Conservative media celebrated
BLACK RAINSTORM WARNING SIGNAL!
Liberals in FlamesA single set of talking points is the foundation of elite punditry
Three Children Attacked a Black Woman. A Sheriff’s Deputy Arrived — and Beat Her More
When Police Kill and Use Victim’s Rights Laws to Stay Anonymous
Is Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger Weird Enough?
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL
Melon's X's digital Leviathan
Inside the Censorship Industrial Complex
Your Thanatological Vacation Guide
Elephants Have Specific 'Names' For Each Other
Fuck helmetball, but I'm thoroughly fascinated by brands and uniforms, and if I was the new owner of the local professional helmetball team my lawyers would already vetting possible copyright problems with this this nanosecond
The Impossible: Lee Friedlander's photography
In 2008 L & C & I flew to California for vacation, my strongest memory of the trip was a HUGE Friendlander exhibit at SFMA, I was KABOOMED!
{ feuilleton }'sI was born without the Elliott Smith gene but if you were here
The Holy Heresies of George Eliot
When Gram Met Emmylou on M St.





THE COPPER BEECH

Marie Howe

Immense, entirely itself,
it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it
and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell
darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,
I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.