Ghost Faces, Doubtful Gifts

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Inside joke (x 3), that

I cleaned plum pen and filled it with plum ink cleaned brass blue pen filled it w my favorite ink brown ink and put them and the tablet into the backpack and wrote for an hour while Earthgirl watercolored in a meadow, this unlocked typed grids to color, so not fuck me

< Why I cleaned my pens

Also too

I'm bursting YAY! but scary sorta

OLD ALBUM

Tom Clark

No past bears presents to equal being here.
Put that book away. Ghost faces, doubtful gifts.
Word apparitions washed ashore to perish
As life roars by in blue reverie blurs,
Tulips incandescent as the rain that beats them
When March storms unleash this wild dance of forms.
Presence comes before being, being before
There was ever a you or me. Ancient
Grief will go from you as from sorrowing songs
Sorrow goes, leaving nothing for you
To whom everything belongs because your poor
Defenseless inner self has gaily sailed
Into the room like all the modern languages
Coming down to us, so you could say these things.

& now the strident are strident about all the stridency

Pasteboard Masks	I make myself read out loud the whale-killing and especially the whale-harvesting chapters of that effingingly American biblical whale novel	My brother-in-law *yesterday* gave Earthgirl for her birthday last Tuesday mega-million tickets for last Tuesday, surprisingly there were no matching numbers	I love my anger but building silos for them harder than building tunnels for them unless and until I figure out how to set font sizes for them not provided by motherfucking google sheets, I need sixteen for this silo and only have 14 or 18, fine metaphors for my complicity abound, so today this cathole	Eff me, I keep going back to your Frownland
My wife and daughter are both public school art teachers, Earthgirl elementary, Planet senior high. Both want to be back in classrooms, parents want children back in classrooms, outrageous as it where teachers rank on the Save Me chart, if there *is* available vaccine, which there *isn't*, why can't shitlords get it into arms? today in motherfucking rhetorical questions regarding our motherfucking shitlords ignoring you to death as they extract your motherfucking rents				I make myself read out loud the whale-killing (I don't mind the people dying) of the effingly American biblical whale novel and force myself to read the gruesomest parts out loud twice

 

The planet dying faster than we thought	Liberalism's war on the internet	<<<< To make curated pluralism credible as genuine pluralism, the state must not be seen to enforce the curation. The curation must appear to be the natural consequence of reasonable, mature arguments winning out over unreasonable, immature arguments.	Better off w/o Trump on twitter, worse off w twitter in charge	What would Jesus coup?
Signal is not your friend	Two faces of US empire	Fascism, fascisation, anti-fascism	<< ^^^>> If only someone kept yodeling *it's never policy, it's always decorum*	Neoliberalism is fascism with better manners
Hideous strength	<<<< The Democrats have always been extraordinarily complacent about the affective pull of such inchoate fascism (let alone their own role in creating the conditions for its rise). In 2016, as Trump delivered his vatic jeremiad of America’s decline, victimisation by other countries, economic devastation at the hands of globalists and of China, immersion in violence and chaos brought by immigrants, and descent into Third World conditions, Obama intervened with cheerful bemusement, insisting that all was not so bad. The ‘birds were chirping and the sun was out’, he said the day after a Trump speech. People were watching their kids play in sports teams and getting ready for the weekend. What could be more innocent, less suggestive of End Times? That Trump’s paranoid and hateful messaging was far more efficiently wired into the emotional world of masses of voters, that it articulated and gave form to real experiences of injury and loss, would shortly become apparent. The birds chirped, the sun came out, the rustbelt died, the wildfires raged, Flint’s water was poisoned, migrants were detained and deported at record levels, real wages continued to flatline, unions were demolished. And Trump was elected.
The rabble and the door	Misinformation v Disinformation	Motherfucking Democrats	Motherfucking Democrats	Political science is bullshit, say political scientists
The $ is dead	Baseless	Maggie's weekly links	My future hell	My future hell
The problem with common nouns	{ feuilleton }'s weekly links	Among the contemplatives	Henri Cole interview	Throbbing Gristle reflect on Throbbing Gristle!

SUBURBAN PASTORAL; REJOINDER; ANNIVERSARY; prayer for the young

Rebecca Foust

& now the strident are strident about all the stridency
meta-screeds acid-etching each earthly beauty
into carnal indulgence      even the toyon berries
diploid with raindrops     even the sweet pudding pulp
of the ripest persimmon     even the tang
of eucalyptus in rain     yes there is cancer
caused by factory runoff     & war     & ever
more cancer & war     yes in our rich land
the same people get shot & deported & stay poor
& the earth endlessly burns     yes we have killed
cecil the lion     & wiped out entire species of fish
with the micro-beads in the paste that polishes our teeth
yes the years once lay before us like a banquet
of tulip-shaped glasses stroked to resonance
& singing their million crystalline promises     kept
for one or two nights before the shards got carted away
but may I say     you need not foreswear     everything
need not take up our lament     tear your hair
flail the poor bleeding backs born decades too late
to have caused any of this     somewhere war
followed peace     & will be followed by peace again
somewhere a sad clown-faced lion still paces the veldt
& you will be loved with all the tenderness you crave
a life is a line containing an infinity of points like this one
but none with any specific gravity     the liars
will say this does not apply     O do not listen to them
& their naysaying     may you live long     you young bitter ones
may you live long     & learn to cherish even the blighted hours

I Cannot Go Back to Your Frownland

Born 80 years ago today, click for lots more, innermost circle of rotating seat-takers in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, the above song this shitty blog's Theme Song 10, the above song's lyrics below

My smile is stuck	I cannot go back to your Frownland	My spirit's made up of the ocean	And the sky 'n' the sun 'n' the moon
N' all my eyes can see	I cannot go back to your land of gloom	Where black jagged shadows	Remind me of the coming of your doom
I want my own land	Take my hand and come with me	It's not too late for you	It's not too late for me
To find my homeland	Where a man can stand by another man	Without an ego flying	With no man lying
N' no one dying by an earthly hand	Let the devils burn and the beggar learn	N' the little girls that live in those old worlds	Take my kind hand
My smile is stuck	I cannot go back to your Frownland	I cannot go back to your Frownland

Theory Is a Scream Slowed by Vintage Technology

The internet went out in the office I'm working and I don't have an analog tablet in my backpack or a pen or pencil to use	I can't be in my office because today kill the mice and rats day, it's colder, north end of campus construction on the old people harvesting facility has driven the rats to south campus, my office sniffing glue toxic		Weird not hearing from Trump, not volted my missing the volts tells me I volunteer for jolts	There was no paper and no pen or pencil in the empty office I was sitting, not on empty shelves, not in empty drawers, if I had needed to communicate one last message and the wifi was out I never could have reached you!
My first daydream Coup On! Wad Cholf resigned as Himmler, WHY! and wouldn't cutting off the Internet *be* one of the first steps Cholf's replacement would order when activating Homeland Security to protect democracy	I had bars on phone and could have thumbed myself and after ten minutes had boinked the app but wait! the radiant life giving Sun of wifi appears, will I remember to put a lighthouse and pen in backpack tomorrow?	Five students who could have returned to work this week according to campus emailed me today their parents don't want them anywhere near DC for foreseeable future and it ain't covid	AND WHERE ARE THE PARDONS, DON	^^^^ I just found my current but abandoned lighthouse tablet and grey felt bag of Lamy Safari fountain pens, all but two of the pens comatose, in need of deep nib cleaning, into backpack they go against another digital crisis
Didn't you think and predict out loud some version of Trump's cracker revolution long before we knew Trump would be cracker messiah?		Did you think, in this country, our shitlords, coked out on capitalism, wouldn't over-coax enough crackers into a Hallmark moment that captures the cracker insurrection with bodycounts?	The old people harvesting facility's construction continues apace, one facilities friend told me covid's been a blessing and constrcution schedule pushed ahead, our shitlords have moneyed old people to harvest, and pronto	We do now own just short of twelve and a half acres in Michigan, I had a $50 unpaid bill on an ATT account from 2007, I was the delay, once I got that fucker paid, easy

 

 

^^^ Morton Feldman born 95 years ago yesterday, I wish I didn't have Doctor Sevrin ears that love the sound but not the death grip of good earphones	The terror of Liberals in a time of insurrection	Vicious impotence	<<<< To ask an obvious question: how can the Democrats continue to blame the dispossessed working class for their own immiseration if they can no longer tell these people to learn to code, since learning to code necessarily entails enmeshing oneself into the massive electronic surveillance and control mechanism we’re now declaring off-limits to anyone whose beliefs fall an inch to the left or the right of the Democrat narrative du jour? And what are the implications for everyone else? Ours is a flimsy society built upon layers and layers of obvious contradictions, sure, but what will things look like when those contradictions are enforced with the viciousness of our carceral state, even as they shift as rapidly as social media demands our perceptions to change?	Accelerant not catalyst
Citizenship is a myth	W(h)ither America?	Waiting for George to exttay me my ntifaay instructions on my Whisper 2020 ecoderday ingray to elltay me who to nuffsay		A sentenct typed to my boss Bookkeeper in real email: Not a big deal at all, just wanted to counter the thought that I had abandoned them. With media equipment taking up so much space now and the ILL closet off-limits and you're having told me to only designate one carrel for access storage it seemed a reasonable choice.
The overton window is an elevator	Mediacracy	<<< As it stands, we’re deep into Hardcore Class War. The Top of the Scam Gang are in full control. The remains of “Democracy” have gelled into Mediacracy. Ahead, there’s nothing but ruthless purge, protracted crackdown, censorship, blanket surveillance, smashing of civil liberties, a single narrative, overarching cancel (in)culture. It gets worse: next week, this paranoid apparatus merges with the awesome machinery of the United States Government... Cui bono? Techno-Feudalism, of course – and the interlocking tentacles of the trans-humanist Great Reset. Defy it, and you will be cancelled		Feldman the second most important birthday on January 12 in my life

 

 

LECTURE ON THE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE

Claire Schwartz

Before the alphabet, there was the house.

A proto-Semitic hieroglyphic symbol

depicting a house becomes the letter b.

beyt, beit. beit lechem. no house : no bread,

no book, no baby, no babble.

b b b b b b b b b b

When the temple was written, the destruction

of the temple was written.

The house scripts its defense.

(The house writes the fence.)

In the beginning, there was:

 

                                       A) night                A) tent

                       B) day                   B) house

A: The letter, scoring the darkness.

Q: In the beginning, what was?

A: The beginning.

Q: What answered the question silence asked?

 

the alphabet : ruin of silence

      The only way back: through language, language

      destroying the silence. The shadow language casts

      is silence. No language, no shadow. No know, no

      no no no no no no.

To ruin your knowing in your mouth

and dress the ruins with your best tongue.

 

First the temple, then the book

leading back to the temple.

So the interior is measured, apportioned.

walled square footage : living space

It is settled then.

            A house is a home

            and other embroidered facts.

It becomes you, your craft.

            Birdhouses, henhouses, doghouses.

            Like us, like us, we chirp.

                                    (Who’s the bird now?)

The problem with liking is

                      the conflation of desire with similarity.

We form our mouths to fence we in.

We fence our forms to mouth we in.

babble : b b b b b b b b b b

Inside the house, the family.

Inside the family, the house.

Inside the tower, the princess

           does not dream

           of the tower.

Theory is a scream slowed by vintage technology.

                                                           “Touch me,” Amira says. “Touch me.”

           The model of  the house is the size of  a house.

           You confuse the conditions

           that make something possible

           with the conditions that make

           something necessary.

You don’t see thinking as an emergency.

You own to prove you cannot be owned.

In owning, you sign a contract of possession.

           The ghost tells the story of the house,

           but none of the other tenants know how to listen.

You lock yourself out: morning.

You lock yourself in: night.

Ownership is a chronic condition.

Install a camera to conjugate the strangeness.

           The house draws your speech like a bath: sink,

                      yard, repair, astroturf, neighbor, clean, handyman.

                                 That good good light.

           The first bedroom makes you sad.

           The second bedroom makes a baby.

           In the corner of the living room, the whole globe

           spun by children.

It’s more than the Accountant told you it would be.

Which came first, the fence or the yard?

Ink on a black page

     A poem wrestles the ghost with its limited mouth.

        A poem touches the hip of a ghost.

        In the dark, a thousand names bloom.

     No country comes of that night.

Because you needed a fence to limit your loneliness.

Because haunting needed a form.

What is wild? That which cannot be measured.

                                                                                       “Amira! Amira!”

Or: to produce a thought of the outside

from the inside and use it as a tunnel.

But you didn’t know you were inside.

           Someone laid the new bricks

           around you while you slept.

You skinned animals and adorned your captivity.

Modern architects called the surfaces of  their buildings skins.

                      Your skin was light.

                      Your skin was feathers.

                      You dreamed of another.

           You lit a match.

Your child named it sun.

house _________

          A) trained

     B) broken

Inside the house, a man hits you.

Then you understand:

your body is the window.

Inside, you are already outside.

Next door, the Soloist domesticates a tune.

Poetry is a door without a house.

           Theory is productive of the known.

           Poetry is productive of the unknown.

                      How, then, do you know

                      what is true? These walls, this foundation,

                      in the pages of glossy magazines.

                      The newspapers scratch their heads.

                Again, the hunters, budgeting.

At the end of the day, you return to what is not common.

Debtor, debtor

Put on your best sweater

The magic’s fled, the milk’s gone bad

There’s nothing left but weather

What is desire fulfilled?

           A) satisfaction

      B) rot

           The man reaches through his woman.

                           The sound of a thousand plates shattering.

                           A butterfly impaled by a human name

                           tumbles through the light like an angel.

Your dreams become modest, smooth their skirts, stand up.

The house is without simile.

Inside, everything is alike.

A deed is bad magic, ownership the spell.

Your yard, polluted with growth.

The head in your oven,

your most faithful tenant.

 

 

                                  Amira sits under a tree, unpinning the names from things.

                                                                 She releases the names to the wind.

                                                        The wind churns the names to pigment,

                                                                                  carries the colors off like

Oh, I know what a house is.

A house is my knowing.

Knowing is faith absent doubt.

           When doubt is cleaved from faith,

           where does it go?

           (A caucus of ghosts, cackling.)

Knowing casts no shadow.

Let me turn my face toward my life.

Let me live inside it forever.

The Dictator’s name,

scrawled in the Dictator’s hand

on the I-beams of your house.

That is the law.