Darkness Starts Inside of Things, Keeps on Going When the Things Are Gone

Every Sunday morning at 9:28 my iPhone texts me data on the past week's screen time, this past Sunday Apple told me my usage last week down 49% from the previous week. It occurs to me as I type this that I haven't checked my stats at this shitty blog or the other shitty blog (where there's no point checking the stats, though that never stopped me before). I think I've tweeted less. I'm not writing, not painting. Not not writing, not not painting, just not writing or painting. Finished reading but not processing McCarthy's *Passenger," will start its coda today or tomorrow, both the best worse book and worse best book I've read since the last. Read Larry Levis' *Elegy,* Levis a poet many of the poets I do read always recommend that I hadn't read, get why they do even if I, entirely predictably, don't ping. Just looked at my digital tablet, no entires in a month, no poetry in analog tablet in a month, nothing in analog tablet but three short entries noting that I'm not writing or painting. Cannot imagine, after reading the McCarthy, restarting the Fosse, I'll take McCarthy's God over Fosse's Jesus one hundred and one times out of a hundred. I apprehend and process my daily reprogamming in square blocks of duh hovering transparently behind my eyes, they turn yellow when I put in my glaucoma drops. Life in the Duhocene. Have I told you three times we are being reprogrammed? I know, I can't imagine reading Vollmann now either. I never would have guessed how anticlimatic and dull and horrifying the deliberate and permanent breaking of kayfabe would be. Zoomed last week with three friends once miles and years away, now galaxies and eons and lifetimes away. I blame me for all of it. Links collected from the last week below before they're stale

Trains, planes, parasitism, and decay
Victimhood and vengeance: on white American christers
Five creepiest moments at the Shitlord Convention
I guarantee peasant-control discussed in closed meetings of the Shitlord Convention
The Business of Strategic Sabotage
Designer economy?				PROPAGANDA!
Is easy money an engine of inequality?
Have you tried being less poor?
Today in rhetorical questions!
All igspays are bastards, every single one
The algorithmic gamblification of work
All igspays are bastards, every single one
Today in rhetorical questions!
DEATH GAP				FRESH HELL
Generous, excellent, and smart review of Goransson's *Summer, * which I vouch for completely
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				Wren on Calvary
Classical music's problem nailed in one sentence
In good news, someone put Delgados in my head

DARKNESS STARTS

Christian Wiman

A shadow in the shape of a house

slides out of a house

and loses its shape on the lawn.

Trees seek each other

as the wind within them dies.

Darkness starts inside of things

but keeps on going when the things are gone.

Barefoot careless in the farthest parts of the yard

children become their cries.

Look Up with the Rapt and Stupid Look of Saints in Paintings

To stop myself thinking about it I bought an Arches 12 x 12 hot-press watercolor block which, if I'd thought about it instead of thinking I needed to buy it, is too big for the bed of the scanner I use so I can post the squares here and there and too big for the laminator I use so that the squares can be handled without fountain pen ink staining fingers, the below is the 12 x 12 cropped to 11 x 11, fine metaphors abound

I've stopped exactly halfway through Fosse's *Septology.* I forced myself to pick it up once, not twice, I sin for not reading it end to end like I once told myself I sinned if I didn't but promise to read after I finish, laugh, McCarthy's *The Passenger,* let me say this about that, I've ordered *Stella Maris* which I'll read after I finish the second half of Fosse's *Septology.* Fosse's Asle has a dog, McCarthy's Bobby has a cat, John Cale has a new song:

Many echoes between the two novels, many probably just me reaching, shared themes, standard novel info-striptease. *The Passenger* is often funny and on two occasions so far laugh out loud funny. I'm open to it and I don't know if I hope I'm wrong or not but lay heavy odds that not *once* will I laugh out loud reading *Septology,* which I will finish though now I like the guy whose move is short verb-less sentences versus this 824 page one sentence novel, another fucking one sentence novel, now, more often than not squeezed into a single paragraph sausage if you're lucky, a too common and now irritating gimmick, it's old, motherfuckers. Old, though below is a new Yo La Tengo song

Owned! I've been owned! I had no idea!
Mike Davis's Ten Immodest Commandments
Third World War				KEVORKO 3000
White people whitewashing MLK
Imperial dominance disguised as Democratic deterrence
NATO and the long war on the 3rd World
We must separate from the burning house
White people whitewashing MLK
Jon Fosse and the art of tedium
A syntax of cadaverous dignity
Maggie's weekly links				JOHN CALE!
Why I divorced the Orioles 25 years ago
Virology as ideology				FRESH HELL
Second to last paragraph: "(PJ) Harvey will release a new studio album—her first in seven years—in 2023" so wOOt!
{ feuilleton }'s weekly					Luddite library
New Sleaford Mods song is lol good

FICTION

Howard Nemerov

The people in the elevator all
Face front, they all keep still, they all
Look up with the rapt and stupid look of saints
In paintings at the numbers that light up
By turn and turn to tell them where they are.
They are doing the dance, they are playing the game.

To get here they have gone by avenue
And street, by ordinate and abscissa, and now
By this new coordinate, up. They are three-
dimensional characters, taken from real life;
They have their fates, whether to rise or fall,
And when their numbers come up they get out.

Look For a Black Dog Who Answers to My Whistle

Morton Feldman, born 97 years ago today, still and always one of my deities. One of my proofs of some animating spirit piloting the world: the impossibility of listening to Feldman when driving, so quiet his loud the road and car noise drowns it out, driving my favorite venue for music

L born X years ago today! send her a wish

FUCK THE POETRY POLICE!
Hyperconnected culture and its discontents
The mother of all limited hangouts
I'm old and conspiracy-driven so it's certainly only a coincidence news of Biden trumping documents and Marxist Democrats banning gas stoves breaks the same week after the cracker shitshow in the House
NATO and the long war on the Third World
HORSE LORDS
The West is weak where it matters
The ethics of watching helmetball
Helmetball is a metaphor for America?
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Relentlessness: a syllabus
Vodalazkin?			{ feuilleton }'s weekly
What literature do we study from the 1990s?
Rest in Peace, Charles Simic
Laugh, when I think of Feldman I think of Stanley Elkin whose Bad Man was Feldman and whose novels I was reading when listening to lots of Morton

EMPIRE OF DREAMS

Charles Simic

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.

Hour before the curfew.

A small provincial city.

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner

Where I shouldn’t be.

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

It Came Like an Ice Cream Truck with Its Weird Tinkling Music

I *am* writing, it just reads like this at this moment

New never before place, my head, at least for now, for reasons I could but do not want to explain to myself in typed and/or scribbled English, it makes me happy and scares the fuck out of me, on breaks I paint while last three days listening to Big Blood's holyfuck new EP:





Do you have bandcamp? Let me buy it for you. My never before head? (Yes, they are all self-portraits, headshots.) Reading Fosse's *Septology* a major factor, first first-read novel since Murnane's *Million Windows* to crack my self-absorption and slice me open like a melon with a novel that teaches me more about me than I'd ever be willing to teach myself even *if* I knew it. The previous sentence is not Fosse-like, I'm not worried about catching a Fosse-tic, but the first clause of this sentence and this last clause of the sentence *is* Murnane and me. My breaks: read, paint, read, paint, read

Music must be on when paint, wet a canvas, pour more wetness, pore over it, watch it drying, I pore over it and watch the washes drying, thinking about *Septology* (and, still, Diane Seuss' *Frank*) and when still canvas is still wet, not even tamped to damp, and I know I should wait and I promise myself I'll wait, I pour more wetness over it. Also too

I'm fine, thanks for asking, the five of you. Whatever besides Fosse and Seuss and the jeffhead I'm making I'm thinking about when listening to good music and watching gouache dry isn't daily dumbfuckery, hot out of the shitlords' dumbfuckery factory, and I'd have volunteered for this if I'd seen it coming, all to say, I'm not dark, am happy, cat-alert, laughing, no agenda to do X, no agenda to not do Y beyond no grid of dumbfuckery (and yumduckery) today and none planned soon and none not planned soon

[INTIMACY UNHINGED, UNPADDOCKED ME]

Diane Seuss

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it.

Believe me, I didn’t want it anymore. Who in their

right mind? And then it came like an ice cream truck

with its weird tinkling music, its sweet frost. I fled

to the shore and saw how death-strewn, all the body

parts washed up and sucked clean like that floor mosaic

by Sosus of Pergamon, Unswept House. Seabirds

flocked and dematerialized like they do. Bees raged

at their own dethroning. Love came close anyway,

found me out, its warped music all the rage. It had

a way, just by being in proximity, of opening

the shells of the bivalves. Disclosing their secret

meat. One doesn’t really suck on frozen sugar water.

One allows it to melt in the oven of the mouth.

so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it

George's New Year's song by tradition
They will be glued as one painting on poster board but the scanner I have access to is 17 inches wide, I need 18 or my horns or feet get cut off. Alternatively I can get my hands on 6x6x6 shipping boxes, create a second three-me and make a two-me die
⇧	Today's monologue and not-resolution but promise						⇧
The future of poetry				versus some dope the NYT paid to write a column claiming poetry is dead
Multipolaristas’ Theory of Ultra-Imperialism Doesn’t Fit a Multipolar World
The collateral damage of capital
"Tired of self-abuse, anesthetized by drugs and alcohol, disillusioned white males have taken permanent residence in a conflicting configuration between life as they wanted it and life as it has been. They have been lost in their desperate search for a savior who will restore their (perception of) lost dignity and self-respect, and reclaim, on their behalf, what they always considered rightfully theirs, the privilege of luck."
Why she's glad Joe Biden beat Trump
Lack of good analysis contributes to the decline of "The West"
NATO's business is selling arms, not winning wars
Existential Horror At Wealthy Elite Selling Off Humanity’s Future Successfully Sublimated Into Yelling At Cashier
"A Jewish Frankenstein candidate stitched together from flinty chunks of conservative policy, MAGA talking points and misinformation algorithmically beloved to the roughly 30% or so of Jewish Americans who vote Republican"
Maggie's weekly				"Our system is set up to create mutual antagonism between members of the working class. Meanwhile, faceless corporate executives remain shielded like mob bosses"
14 discoveries about human evolution in 2022
Academia		Bleggalgaze (not mine) (and another reminder why I keep blegroll mortuaries)
Happy four decades, Mr Alarum, Sasha V!
Like a dope I speed-ordered this w/o thinking
Maintainers			Financial Hegemony
The Art of Urine in the Age of Fulfillment
{ feuilleton }'s weekly					Jorie Graham
Typing this sentence at 9:03am January 1, 2023, I've not yet need start my soon-to-be created Dead List 2023, may it be much shorter than the one I didn't create for Death Year 2022
This shitty blog's newest Theme Song and this shitty blogger's 2022 Theme Song, yes, posted *again*

TO THE NEW YEAR

W.S. Merwin

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible