Man *Is* a Puny Thing, Divorced Whether He Knows It or Not

• Lunch yesterday with my ex-Warrenite colleague, she doesn't think motherfucking Democrats understand that lifelong Democrats like her say they view the upcoming SCOTUS fight as the get your shit together and fight or we're done crisis of the marriage, though I assured her they do. 
• Democrats have to play the reasonable ones now that the fight hasn't officially started, I said, it's their job, but don't worry, I said, when the time comes to fight they won't, that's their job too.
• What I didn't say to her: for shitlords, and the senior management of both Republican and Democratic divisions, Ginsberg's death the greatest gift imaginable. The WORSE CASE SCENARIO is a 6-3 SCOTUS guaranteeing unencumbered shitlordism until mass extinction, four years of a self-enfeebled Democratic potus followed by a just as vicious but much less gauche Trump so Villagers will be happy, and an increase in cracker policies that will drive you estranged divorcees back into the arms of motherfucking Democrats
• What I didn't say to her: you wouldn't want your team to do right now what you're complaining the bastard team is doing? and if no, what does that tell you about your team? and your fandom?
• All these years I copied code from youtube and pasted into the html code of blegger, but the new interface's html doesn't break into separate easily distinguishable lines but snakes into infinity. I had never used the insert video code on the dashboard but just discovered it today as I try to learn how to use the new interface, so now squarer than rectangular tunes here

1. What is the sound of thought?
2. Living
3. Why DC and Baltimore are different colors from space
4. America's hungry children are hungry because...
5. Our shitlords are a laundromat
6. The withdrawal of our shitlords
7. The coming election clusterfuck
8. Lisa Robertson interview, incredibly thought provoking on poetry, on politics
9. The magnificent agony of the artist two kilometers up
10. Another postmodern dinner
11. There's new Basinski in November, first piece out now
    
12. I like Ariel Pink, a lot, I don't think I've ever posted him

WE TRAVELED TO THE STONEMASON OF TOR HOUSE, ROBINSON JEFFERS

James Tate

We traveled down to see your house,

Tor House, Hawk Tower, in Carmel,

California. It was not quite what

I thought it would be: I wanted it

to be on a hill, with a view of the ocean

unobstructed by other dwellings.

Fifty years ago I know you had

a clean walk to the sea, hopping

from boulder to boulder, the various

seafowl rightly impressed with

your lean, stern face. But today

with our cameras cocked we had to

sneak and crawl through trimmed lawns

to even verify the identity of

your strange carbuncular creation,

now rented to trillionaire non-

literary folk from Pasadena.

Edged in on all sides by trilevel

pasteboard phantasms, it took

a pair of good glasses to barely see

some newlyweds feed popcorn

to an albatross. Man is

a puny thing, divorced,

whether he knows it or not, and

pays his monthly alimony,

his child-support. Year after year

you strolled down to this exceptionally

violent shore and chose your boulder;

the arms grew as the house grew

as the mind grew to exist outside

of time, beyond the dalliance

of your fellows. Today I hate

Carmel: I seek libation in the Tiki

Bar: naked native ladies are painted

in iridescent orange on velvet cloth:

the whole town loves art.

And I donate this Singapore Sling

to the memory of it, and join

the stream of idlers simmering outside.

Much as hawks circled your head

when you cut stone all afternoon,

kids with funny hats on motorscooters

keep circling the block.

Jeffers, ...

Umpteen Times the Tenth Part of a Featured World

• My second thought at news of Ginzberg's death: bipartisan hypocrisy, and on my twitter timeline many outraged Liberal twaat lists of Republicans defending not merrickgarlanding seemingly unaware people on conservative twuuuter timelines no doubt posting lists of Democrats demanding Obama's constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court Justice at anytime during his presidency
• My third thought was 87? I'm having dinner Monday night with someone 88, you and SeatSix figure out the restaurant, we'll pick it up
• My first thought was jesusfuck another hillarylitigationfest and obamapologists versus obamapostates debate 
• (in my first in-person we both quickly decided to enjoy the hike instead)
• My fourth thought: it's still eleven days to October, forty-five days until election day
• My fifth thought is I was wearing barefoot shoes when my tires blew and I walked home, they are perfect for people like me who hate going barefoot and never go barefoot unless sleeping or showering (people can vouch) but don't always want to wear trail shoes, they are wonderful for house and office but suck slapping asphalt two miles uphill, fuck, my feet hurt
• My sixth thought, I've yodeled for years Democrats need campaign on SCOTUS and DoJ, they didn't want to, will be fascinating to watch how they still won't enough
  
• My seventh thought, enjoy is no longer the verb, as in when I said comfortably from my Sofa of Complicity, "I should be enjoying this more," but I should be enjoying this more
  
• Eighth thought: Imagine taking a two week break from contact with the clusterfuck, imagine taking a break until November 4, if I had the opportunity, Earthgirl and me, someplace spectacularly gorgeous, electricity to read and cook and clean by but no clusterfuck content, would I? 
• Ninth thought: I'll never know
• Tenth thought: this weekend's forgotten band from my CD crates

 

• I must confess that song is always just a click from being in my head
  
• On American Mass Shooters
• The last Monday on Earth: Mark Fisher's post-capitalist desire
• The War on Populism: The Final Act 
• Blaming the voters
  
• Avocado politics
• Caravan's occasional links
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly link  
• Exploration is a flawed notion
• Excerpt from DeLillo's new novel reminds me why I don't reread DeLillo's old novels and never particularly liked them when I read them 
  
• Anne Carson's *Sumptuous Destitution*
• On Bill Callahan's new album
  
• The woman erased from Bauhaus

 

BLUES FOR ALICE

Clark Coolidge

When you get in on a try you never learn it back

umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world

in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail

bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without

travail of the tale, the one you longing live

and singing burn

 

It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out

or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .

and other riskier small day and fain would be

of the soap a sky dares

 

                                               but we remand,

that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of

tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back

and back and leave my edge, and add an L

 

Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page

its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people

the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings

the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in

in her rhythm

that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap

and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on

keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam

and give back the voice, like those eary dead

 

Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired

enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom

where the last comes by first ever ring, every

race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil

in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare,

the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime

in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores

of those whispering gone crenulations

 

To meet a care is to dial redeem

and we limp in the time sound balms

so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win

in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win

the way a blue is never singular

In the Dictionary Looking Up the Distinction Between Necessity and Need

• My goddamn free blogging platform made good its autobotted promise to kill the "legacy blaaager" interface which I used until I couldn't
• I'm not going to bitch beyond saying once only, Fuck! my goddamn free blogging platform, and
• (a) if things look different that's why
• (b) I can't set as default that links open in a new window like I could before, I have to check the open in a new window box for each link, forgive me in advance if I miss some, if you're like me you like a new window, if you're like me it feels like cheating for stats to make people back arrow, and
• (a) this will take getting used to, and I've already learned don't enlarge font, don't bullet, don't do shit until you have to because code is a motherfucking snake
• (c) The loaner 2021 Subaru Legacy I'm driving (while my 2013 Subaru Impreza gets recall fixes and new tires and complete realignment) a fucking casino slot machine and yet I can drive it
• (a) >>dB<<
• (d) I am telling you three times, we are being reprogrammed
• Here's Earthgirl's oil still drying Portrait of Dogduck
  

• The theocratic mantra of our age
• How the West lost
• The social logic of climate breakdown
• The Big Smoke
• Assorted deleted motherfucking Democrat links
• Yesterday
• I want to be a real boy, part two
• New book review by Dan: Baring the Contrivance 
  
• Email on my neighborhood's listserv yesterday (I can find someone who'll vouch): We are 4 or 5 youngish seniors who enjoy a fun game of Scrabble about 6 on Saturday evenings. Since we have only one man playing it would be nice to have a second fellow join us.  This is after dinner and w/o beer etc. we are on Parkwood Drive. Send a message if interested. 
  

 

 

 

• Treating American empire   
• Politics in an American industry
• Random barking
• Wordpress just updated their interface too 
• just leave me alone, I'll figure it out
• Avedon Carol's occasional links
• A sketch on globalization and ethnopoetics
• Poetry lessons from the advanced in age
• William Carlos Williams birthday today 
• Richard and Linda
• The dBs song top segment always make me thing of

 ALL SOULS 

Saskia Hamilton

1586

I was in the dictionary looking up
the distinction between necessity
and need, or requirement, “the constraining
power of circumstances.” The dictionary
gives an example from Sidney and Golding:
Of the necessitie that is conditionall,
and not of the necessitie that is
absolute. Sidney met his end one morning
when, writes Greville, by the banks of the IJssel,
an “unfortunate hand” sent forth a bullet
that broke the bone in his thigh.
So great was his thirst, he asked
for drink; but before it touched his lips,
he saw a “poor soldier carried along”
who “ghastly cast his eyes up” at the bottle.
Sidney gave it to him. You, whose
“necessity,” he said, “is yet greater than mine.”
Within weeks, and with the “fixing
of a lover’s thought on those eternal
beauties,” he died in Arnhem on the baker’s street.

2010

Is there point to critical interpretation
that gives us “what we all know already, what
inescapably and instantly strikes
the eye,” as Rosen wrote in June? Then Ricks
asked if Rosen would agree to any
like assertion of a musical phrase
striking the ear? I spent the hours that season
in a basement library magnifying
Bishop’s hand ten times to read the word
“tidal.” On the daily train along
the river, the conductor sometimes returned,
sometimes pocketed, my ticket.
“An interpretation,” Rosen said,
“must either uncover or create a secret.”
“I give you simply what you have already,”
reasoned Lowell. A fine morning.
Steady summer construction
on the avenue stories below.

1947

After the peace, autumn Sunday,
a fine one, smallest child inside, eldest
on a train journey, and he and a friend
in the meadow by the river.
He wore the military duty belt,
the find from the brush that he’d been snapped in
a few days before. They found the tree to climb
and then jumped down this time
onto a mine that had once—though the field
had been swept, they all thought—been laid there
by an unfortunate hand. For sixty years
his face looked up from picture frames
in the houses of their friends. She kept
in her clothes a piece of his skull,
and her thumb would stroke it,
as she had once stroked the fontanelle.

1977

The crow took a cracker and my grandfather
scolded it. Six, drinks under the apple tree,
the foxgloves leaning over flower beds
and down at children sipping juice,
white butterflies among the buddleia
and nettles with their feathery trichomes,
and hover flies in the last uncleared area
where meadow met the garden and lawn, arbor
and house. Amice was the crow’s name, it stepped
sideways, crossed its beak on the bench.
The order of six o’clock: shoulder blades
settling down the back, salt on fingers,
prints on glasses, books closed, their linen covers
warming in the westerly light.

Max Drove on the Deserted Beltway

• So last night on the Beltway, roughly a half-mile short of where my car was shot in February 2019, my right rear tire blew out *JUST* before the big curve uphill toward Old Georgetown 
• I was in the 2nd lane to the right, managed to get it to side of road where it sat all night (I'm typing this now, masked, in the Waiting Lounge of the Suburu dealership waiting to hear what additional damage besides new rear tires I might have) 
• I walked home, Earthgirl's car broken too, she couldn't pick me up 
• I will never drive up the big hill towards Old Georgetown again and not think of last night, hoofing it up the two miles of 495 with the speeders and eighteen wheelers zooming by.
• On a positive note, I finally got the night photo I always wanted, once upon a time I wanted the signs to be this shitty blog's banner, that's the sidewalk-less 355 bridge over 495/270

• Maryland's route shield is lame if the banner doesn't say Maryland
  
• Walked up Beltway to Old Georgetown, Old Georgetown to Beech, Beech to Linden, Linden to Pooks Hill, Pooks Hill to 355, 355 to Beach, Beach to Franklin, Franklin to Saul, these signs a major metaphor of my past, current, and possibly future life (as is the tire blow out and walk home)

• These links fished yesterday before the walk home for another post that now doesn't exist
• This: What sociology offers, and what my writing hopefully offers, is an awareness of broader and longer-term trends, within which crises come to make some kind of sense. Marxism is probably the most prominent such theory, inasmuch as it treats change and conflict as normal features of capitalism. I'm not a Marxist, though I am Marxian in some of my approach and thinking. The importance of such work, as far as I see it, is to demonstrate that chaos is not as chaotic and inexplicable as it seems; that irrationality has its own underlying reasons and logic.
• The insidious workings of the political ratchet: motherfucking Democrats
• Ending the war against the climate movement: motherfracking Democrats will not save you
• Was upbraided by a Democratic voter today when I said, of course Democrats are cheating gangsters
• Algorithms and you
• Stanley Moss' lovely new (I think) autobiographical note, Satyr's Song, cameos by Ted Roethke, Dylan Thomas, and others
• There's a new Lambchop album coming, new song here:

WHERE THE WILD THINGS GO

D. Gilson

The night Max wore his wolf suit

made him infamous, bred the child star

never sent to bed. Middle school,

Max started drinking. Not in my house,

his mother begged, No, no, no, wild thing.

Max reminded her who bought

this condo, who paid for her meds.

Freshman year, Max raved. Roared

his terrible roar, rolled, and almost

wound up in a warehouse dead.

Where, oh where, do the wild things

go? To rehab in high school.

To college on residual book sales.

Max kept his head down. Laughed

at drunken frat boys. Bro, let the wild

rumpus start. Max said, No thanks,

and volunteered for the Peace Corps

instead. Two years in Kenya, one

in Belarus, the president thought

Max might be of some use. Max

moved to Washington, appointed

at the State Department a cultural

attaché. One important day Max wore

his wolf-gray suit, then drove home

well past rush hour in a freak snow storm.

Max drove on the deserted beltway,

thought it his throne. Yes, Max belted,

this is where the wild things roam.

Most Weeks I Am No More Than the Color of the Walls

• There is no depth Trump will not be permitted in the Cause of Best-Case Scenario Biden Worse-Case Scenario Trump
• One dependable characteristic of motherfucking Democrats, their sociopathic insistence and organizational ability to maintain the exact level of less-shitty to the ever just shitty more, belies their insistence there's nothing they can fucking do
• Biden best-case with all these new found executive powers motherfucking Democrats will never give back
• Never. Give. Back. Propriety in public manners returned, watch what powers Democrats consolidate then accrue to the executive for President Cotton in 2024
• and Trump, who will consolidate then accrue to the executive for President Cotton in 2024
• The American West Coast is on fire, there are food lines stretching for miles on busy highways, the Senate and House are up for grabs, and the Supreme Court for the next 25 years depends on Ruth Bader Ginzberg's organs to keep functioning until twelve noon Inaugration Day, tell me if I'm wrong, I don't watch anything I'd see advertising, are there any Biden ads about any of these four?
• Rest in Peace. Simeon Coxe

 

• Is your hate pure?
• Maggie's weekly links
• On Diana Rigg
• Blaaager dropping unsubtle hints that any day now they will kill "Legacy Blaaagers" interface for the new interface, so far only difference I've a grievance, I have to type in the beginning letters of tags which also calls for a celebration, I only use ten or so now on a regular basis, I won't have to scroll through dozens of dozens to find the daily tags, but between whatever blaager fuckery ensues and my laptops worsening windows' fustercluckery (it won't shut down clean, I have to hard reboot each time I turn it on, it keeps reloading and insisting I upload the same latest update) if I disappear for a bit it will probably not be voluntary
• Bramleys, Not Grenadiers
• 2020 September 13
• Books, bookshelves, memories
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links

ON KINGDOMS
 
Joanna Klink
 
Who is ever at home in oneself.
Land without mercy. Interstates
set flickering by night. When I speak to you
I can feel a storm falling blackly to the roads,
the pelting rains the instant they
hit. Devotion is full of arrows.
Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls
in the room where we sit, or I am blind to clocks,
restless, off-guard, accomplice to the weathers
that burn and flee, foamless, across a sky
that was my past, that is
what I was. I am always too close.
I am not sure I will ever be
wholly alive. Still—we are faithful.
Small birds hook their flights into the fog.
The heat crosses in shoals over these roads
and this evening the cottonwoods may sway
with that slow darkgold wind
beyond all urgency. I am listening to you.

and the loneliness you love, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe

• I'm writing well now, by which I mean I enjoy writing of a sudden
• I'm typing, not inking in tablet in almost a month
• I'm writing well now typing, not surprised how fast my guilt over abandoning ink and tablet evaporated, surprised to notice I knew ink and tablet haven't been in backpack in a week but I just noticed now
• Valuable self-reminder: just because I think I am writing well doesn't mean I am writing well enough for most people to want to read what I write, but giving up ink and tablets makes me more accountable to myself as a reader of what I write when I say I think I'm writing well
• I submitted the late August haikus as the one poem they are to Rattle on the recommendation of a friend, Rattle says I should get their No! in six months, this the only submission I'm gonna, and thank you E
• John Martyn born 72 years ago yesterday:

• Ed's blog's birthday's bleggalgaze
• 3000 dead on 9/11 meant everything, 200K dead of covid mean nothing, here's why
• Professional liberals are weirdevil
• Stillness at 9/11
• Believing in monsters
• Why hasn't Trump started a war?
• Projecting the 78 days after the election
• Will include red pick-up trucks one way or the other
• Motherfucking Democrats will not save you
  
• Maine's sublime canvas of contradictions. We were in or passed through Blue Hill four times this past vacation
• This weekend's found CD from the past

• Reminder that Democrats are not screaming SUPREME COURT! SUPREME COURT! this election cycle either 
• The emperor's new rules: The latest manifestation of a decadent meritocracy cult that preaches, with little evidence, that the only way to crack low-growth capitalism is with overworked talent, ruthless conformity, contingent policies, rule by fear, and money as the solution to all problems
• Costs of male entitlement
• Another RIP Diana Rigg
• Daniel's last show, at least for awhile, sometimes I hate WFMU, they killed four of my favorite shows for the new season (all four DJs confirmed they didn't jump, they were pushed), this breaks my heart
• Two lost Gillian Welch songs
• Arvo Part 85th birthday yesterday

TO MYSELF

Franz Wright

You are riding the bus again

burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,

the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.

And I am with you.

I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance

(in one of those rooms we are

living) and I am the rain

and the others all

around you, and the loneliness you love,

and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,

the nicotine crawling on your skin—

and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,

and if you vomit this time I will hold you:

everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.

It won’t always be like this.

I am going to buy you a sandwich.