it's not too late for you if it's not too late for me

• Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica released 50 years ago yesterday 
• anthem! fellow clusterfuckers

• One of a dozen of most listened to albums and certainly the album my tripping friends demanded I turn it the fuck off most
• In those days, youngsters, to listen on headphones meant silencing the needle on the turntable for everyone but you, used only when others had crashed
• Judging from reaction to the Trout Mask Replica songs I tweeted last night all of you either are someone I tripped with and told me to turn it the fuck off or someone if we *had* (and still can) tripped together and I'd put Trout Mask Replica on you'd have demanded I turn it the fuck off
• Three out of four people tripping with me would demand I turn Kate Bush the fuck off when I'd play an album and of the one-fourth who liked Kate while tripping seven-eighths were women
• Not surprisingly, most of the tripping friends who'd refuse Beefheart insisted on Zappa
• what a fuckstupid species, us, but it's not too late for you if it's not too late for me (you'll have to listen to the song above to hear that lyric and understand its (clusterfuckful significance) true context within the song
• I love Beefheart, people can vouch, lots HERE

As Good as Rocks

Done with Marlon James' Black Leopard Red Wolf, the first novel by an author I had never read I've read in probably two years. Sadogo is dead, the Minji are dead (but for Smoke Girl, maybe), Leopard is dead but can dig for resurrection (maybe, and *this* maybe may be bridge to second book of planned trilogy). I bet a pint the Aesi gets one of the two. But that is not the story. 

I don't do reviews (Ed does) beyond this, my format for positive reviews: if I like you and you ask nice I'll get you a copy.

First time I enjoyed reading a novel since the last until the next, first time I've wanted to read a next novel (as opposed to feeling obligated to always be in a novel) in forever....

I can't imagine rereading any novel and hereby suspend my (not religiously honored) rotation of rereads, so that copy of Vollmann's Fathers and Crows over on the piano bench which I picked up and read two pages last night, no. I won't do Whale Slaughtering again (ever, if I had to guess now no matter no one used the English language better anywhere, I can't do the whale slaughtering again). I'm giving Pynchon and Barth and Elkin and Melville and Ishiguro and Harington and Gass and Eliot and Vollmann and Dostoyevsky and Grossman and Murnane and Krasnahorkei and anyone else whose novels I've read at least a year off, ibid. 

Recommend something, anything, or not. I'm not taking Olive off:

• The self-destructive trajectory of overly successful empires
• Climate change: slow, slow, slow, BOOM!
• Definition of *liberals*
• Fuck the Popo Sports Satrydee.
• I am constantly asked when I am introduced or need give my name at a service desk if I am related to Grgg. No. It's a common Serb surname.
• Millions of us
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• Cabin
• Oh, I did not read Black Leopard, Red Wolf as a fantasy novel though if it is a fantasy novel it's the first I've ever finished (in the same sense I don't think of Star Trek as science fiction though if it is science fiction it's the only science fiction I've ever watched)
• Something? Anything?

AS GOOD AS ANYTHING

Alice Notley

I don't see the point of

remembering you; you're too boring,

Iowa City, Iowa,

much duller topologically than

Needles, California. I'm here

in the Rebel Motel, with

my grape-colored sweater

and maté tea, whose smoky odor's

bound up with first rooms and foods here

sex and snow. I

write about Needles

Herman and rocks, the story's called

“As Good as Anything,” and in it

daft Herman—true local

of Needles—says

“Rocks is as good as anything.”

I figured that out summer after

first love affair in New York:

hung out, home, at a rock shop

inspecting geodes and thunder eggs

Arsenic samples and petrified

dinosaur dung.

What can I say about Iowa City

everyone's an academic poetry

groupie, I haven't yet written a poem,

there's a bar where for 25 cents a

meal of boiled egg and tiny beer.

Really I don't know what kind of poetry—

what's the name of the make they

use here—or what kinds of

poetry live people write in the world.

Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might

still ask as I patronize,

retrospectively, the Iowa style,

characterized, as I remember,

by the assumption of desperation

boredom behind two-story houses

divorce, incomes, fields, pigs,

getting into pants, well not really

in poems, well no “well”s and all

in the costive mode

of men who—and the suicidal women—

want to be culpable for something,

settle for being mean to their wives

and writing dour stanzas. God this is bitchy

I modeled for art classes

that's rather interesting

the hypocrisy: nobody needs

to paint nude women

they just like to. So here I am

naked for art, which is a lot of

dumb fucks I already know,

same with poetry.

Written and judged by. Those befoibled guys

who think—you know—

the poetic moment's a pocket in

pool; where can I publish it; what can

I do to my second or third wife now.

Nothing happens in Iowa, so

can I myself change here? Yes

I can start to become contemptuous

is that good or bad, probably bad.

In New York I'd developed a philosophy

of sympathy and spiritual equality:

out the window, easily, upon

my first meeting real assholes.

“A rock's as good as anything” 

there are no rocks in Iowa

shit-black soil, a tree or two,

no mountain or tall edifice,

University drabs, peeping Toms, anti-war

riots, visiting poets

treated like royalty, especially if

they fuck the locals or have a record 

of fighting colorfully with their wives.

You can go to the movies once a week,

like in Needles. You can fuck

a visiting poet;  you can be paraded before

a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck.

You can write your first poems

thinking you might as well

since the most stupid people in the universe

are writing their five hundredth here.

I'm doing that now. What

difference does it make.

I like my poems. They're

as good as rocks.

Egoslavian Theme Song Two

The day after the night before yesterday I read a sentence on Pere Ubu's organ on not *only* a new album but possibly the last album and posted about it yesterday before I looked up today's birthday last night and David Thomas is 66 today

I surprise myself, I'm finishing a novel by an author I'd never read, I'm (still) eighty pages from done and I bet everyone but one I care about dies a horrible death (there are no other Kind), and I know why the author must, that his skill doing so will slay me, I need vacation elsewhere than my sillyass deserted islands now, it'd been two summers ago Maine I think I read a fresh novel cold front to back

Ears too

But all David Thomas projects, Pere Ubu most of course but all, one of two permanent seats on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Shitload here.

Peruse the Box Score for Hours

• Well, let me put this me at the top instead of yesterday's me
• Dennis the Peasant, complicit fuck
• Trump broke kayfabe, he didn’t say anything anyone didn’t know was is and will be standard operating procedures, he tweeted
• I don't even bother hating motherfucking professional democrats any more, he tweeted
• Whose posterity is it?
• The hitlerization of Corbyn
• Confessions of a climate activist 
• Propaganda is the root of our all problems
• Yes, my goddamn free-blogging platform fucks with font size when I fuck with font size, it's been months since I fucked around in settings hope it will be months more before I do, but bigger now, less smaller
• The next Pere Ubu album is the last Pere Ubu album?
• Blessed Serendipity, I saw an Ubu tweet this morning after writing in tablet last night how I haven't listened to Kate Bush or Pere Ubu in months, the two permanent members of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, and have no desire not to but have no desire to.
• I'm also eighty pages from the end of a novel in which every character I love I'm certain is gonna die, so there's that.
• Old Pere Ubu:

BASEBALL AND CLASSICISM

Tom Clark

Every day I peruse the box scores for hours   

Sometimes I wonder why I do it

Since I am not going to take a test on it   

And no one is going to give me money

 

The pleasure’s something like that of codes   

Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say   

So as brightly to picturize Eurydice

In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day

 

The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi

Unlullabyeable

Converge Traffic Towards Should

Blogtoo got it's first spam yesterday:

This implies that the relevant website content will probably be adequately indexed the crawlers.
Pr helps in order to converge traffic towards should.
All 9 of these articles were taken by 9 separate entities. http://...

Below (old but lordy still pertinent) posted here now posted there now defeating the purpose me sending you there (unless you click for older)

• I went to Blogtoo and changed the view from one post on front page to thirty (thinking nobody EVER clicks NEXT (correctly, probably*)) then changed it back, if I can't what the fuck there what the fuck am I doing (t)here
• Information bomb
• Rise of Millenial Socialism?
• Medium of exchange
• Return of Motherfucking Democrats
• Austerity and the demonization of disabled people 
• Maggie's weekly links
• Authentic spirituality
• *I didn't notice the ambiguity on *correctly,* is it you or me who is correct thought to clarify then smoked DttE/O, it kicked in
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Was going to post the old *what I can't talk about poem* because holy the fuck is it still pertinent but what the fuck today feels like above
• Robert Fripp's diary
• Bill Callahan interview
• I will download the new Bill Callahan of course, but tell me, say I'm willing to abandon iTunes (chosen by lazy default), suggestions solicited for alternatives (windows) that will allow me to migrate the thousands and thousands of songs (lotsa Smog) I have in iTunes cloud. Disclaimer: I am a digital dolt. Help.
• UPDATE! I'm not paying to change suck

IN A WORD, A WORLD

C.D. Wright

I love them all.

I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a

well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate

a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court

bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that

the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses

and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer

based on age, sex, appearance—e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball.

More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as

transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect

extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when

taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations.

The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am

of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned

them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter

of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing

named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.