The Walls of Jeff’s Villa Resonate With the Intermittent, Migraine-Like Drone of Motorized Gondolas and the Distant Murmur of Cats

Flem Snopes just married the pregnant-but-not-with-his-kid Eula Varner, the fuck am I doing in Yoknapatawpha County at the turn of the 20th century? I'd forgotten Faulkner can be laugh-out-loud funny. When I'm not there I'm in Acadian Canada in the mid-seventeenth century witnessing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans (though, in a typical if vital Vollmann digression, I just spent 50 pages with Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in sixteenth century Spain before his beatification), the fuck am I doing there? and when I'm not there I'm in David Ohle's Pisstown, I know what I'm doing here. I'm grateful that I'm reading and reading well: I've failed a dozen novels, old and new, first reads and rereads, in the past six months, I blame me





Strangest days of my life. Reflexive tick: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, the Earth will be here but will the world? The Faulkner, Vollmann, Ohle novels, the lust for power by assholes is a major theme, it occurs to me that humans would have destroyed the world already if they only had the means, and now that they have the means and the end seems unstoppably inevitable I don't want to read fiction about assholes set in today. Why this is reassuring to me - that humans are no worse than ever they just have the means to enact greater and greater assholosity - is, at best, a coping mechanism that offsets my compulsive documentation of said current assholosity. Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop our immiseration and extinction is evaporating exponentially faster by the second. How 'bout that hockey game, huh?





I actually wanted to bump the George birthday post from the top, fuck me. Music too, sounds I once loved unto never conceiving I'd not only not mind not hearing them for a very long time if not ever fucking again are increasing with clusterfuck's swelling and deepening. I listened to *All Things Must Pass* past Tuesday after posting the birthday, at first I vibrated like always but by "Wah Wah," gone; was horrified but unsurprised. I won't truly worry about my head until hiking with L and playing disc golf suck and being finally incapable of reading anything or listening to anything (I've long since stopped watching anything), but my head is changing, not all for the bad but most, and it's not just aging towards my skeleton days. Yes, I changed the name in the title of this post from the name in the Ashbery poem the title comes from. Ashbery still works for me





Éliane Radigue died this week. If you look at my bandcamp page you'd see some of her music and many artists I would not be listening to now if I hadn't discovered Radigue decades ago. My current immersion (to L's annoyance when she's in my car) in ambience and drone and noise directly related to her seminal music. I've been listening constantly since news of her death. Radigue's music still makes me vibrate and vibrate more resonantly than ever, I'm (almost more relieved than) delighted to report. Need some of the toeholds to my past, yinz

Western Elites Are Making A Play For Eternal Oligarchy
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
"Every fascism has its suhumans. To technofascists, humans are the subhumans"				The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys
Elite psychopathy, mutual blackmail, and the bleeding edge of power
Shoddy People: The redemption of disgrace
On the Motherfucking Democratic Party Style
DCCC Rakes in Millions From Palantir Lobbyists as Protests Target the Company’s ICE Surveillance Tools
"Under pressure, a Dem rep said she would refuse AIPAC money. So instead Hakeem Jeffries is secretly funneling AIPAC money into her race through a shadow super PAC"
Democratic Party elites *WANT* war with Iran
"Again, just a perfect example of Blue MAGA team-sport denialism. Feigned ignorance as a political policy. The "average Biden scandal" was funding a genocide he lied about knowing the severity of while his staff actively hid his obvious mental and cognitive decline for two entire years"
Shittiness		The good rich man?				Shittiness
Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves
The culture war is coming for your electricity
Avedon Carol			Preparation for a lynching
"right wing pastors are screaming, crying, throwing up because John Piper posted a Bible verse on the everything app"
Will Your State Bird Disappear?		Crackers banning books		Depraved face of capitalism		AI On The Pentagon’s Precipice
"In the past 24hrs the WaPo has run pieces arguing for (1) expanding NATO (2) regime change in Cuba (3) regime change in Iran (4) opposition to a ban on congressional stock trading (5) cutting “red tape” to expand AI energy capacity (6) getting rid of social security altogether"
Self-portrait with four legs and a dagger
Rest in Peace, Eliane Radigue
Fabio played three sets of Radigue yesterday

HISTOIRE UNIVERSELLE

John Ashbery

As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 AM it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss is being made; it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.

The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.

To the Fountain of Perpetual Mirth, Let It Roll for All It's Worth, or: Born Eighty-Three Years Ago Today

The best Beatles song is a George song:

The best Traveling Wilburys song is a George song:

The most listened-to album of my life is a George album:

My favorite song ever is a George song:





I've always I loved George most, people can vouch:

The Braincase Was Loose and the Rest Saw Pie Melting

Day after tomorrow is another personal holy day and I'd never forgive myself if I remembered and didn't post (and I didn't remember Auden's birthday and wouldn't have posted if I hadn't been reminded, fuck me). The last February 25 post will be the last February 25 this shitty blog is still alive. Here's a hint





Since I plan to leave it up top through the weekend (and may well fail) a grid below before the links go stale, plus this: Pash Katel celebrating in the US gold-winning ice-soccer team's dressing room (on your dime) as the overtime goal-scoring hero cracker-speechifies Stephen Miller's dream psyop hit. Dump is the idiot savant of lucky, though imagine how much fun it'd've been if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated, troops would be crossing the border as I type this. (On ice-soccer: I've been in Michigan motels when a state peewee ice-soccer tournament is a within 50 mile radius of the town, I guarantee you the ice-soccer dads are magafucks to a one, and their eagerly cracker-groomed kids the next generation). Here is my not-a-team's new crest

O, and Dump posted an AI video of *HIM* scoring the overtime goal, imagine how much more dumpmeltdown tomorrow night's SOTU would be if Canada had won, it still feels like a trainwreck a-coming, L wants me to watch it with her, I said yes. Reminder: Dump won with a US victory, he would have won more if if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated (and imagine if it was an African-Canadian who'd cheated America's white-to-a-man (do *not* underestimate how significant that is to too many American white men) ice-soccer team). The American Equation, sponsored by Shitlordco. Also too. There's new Hen Ogledd and it's gorgeous and angry and necessary:

Did you know that there is still genocide and ethnic cleansing continuing in Gaza and the West Bank?
"This same tactic to funnel outrage over intentional, lawless police violence into **more resources for police** was used in response to Bloody Sunday"
Crypto Chokehold			What is academic labor now?
"Every one of these guys is stupid. Every one. We may look back w disdain on the culture of the 50s and 60s but at least those buzzcuts & long skirts got us to the fucking moon"
Trump is destroying a public park so that he can build a luxury golf course for himself					The Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping Spectacle
The Supreme Court and the cordon sanitaire against the left
Some More Efforts, Comrades, If We Would Be Revolutionaries
Today in *I Will Be a Catholic Again Before I'm Ever a Democrat Again*
⮩	and I promise I will never be a Catholic again
Import the War, Export the Border						Maggie
AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains
Knotweed Factor			Hospitality and the Political
The de Sades Among Us					Danger Zone
Bodily Mutilation, and End of the Masculine West
Cult of the Bully				Trump’s FCC Chair Wants Networks to Run Nationalistic Content and Pledge Loyalty for America’s Big Bday
Something weird for the weekend					New Bill Callahan
Hollering From The Bottom Of A Wishing Well
Dumb waiter		Dumb waiter		At the movies w John Ashbery
More mysterious barricades					{ feuilleton }
The ravenous, radiant, Jim Harrison
Hear what happens when explorers of the ethereal collaborate
Forgotten Words: The Raincoats’ Three Lives
Power Pop Retrospectors (1974 – 1984)
Hen Ogledd was Friday's Bandcamp Daily story

A SPOT OF FRAZZLE AND THEN

Clark Coolidge

The braincase was loose and the rest saw pie melting
we'd have to come home to the lineaments of fire
a lot of squatting included with the sleeping
I imagine pennants with the clothing closing in
dimity fudge due to silence in the breccias
partial poinsettias they lived on Olive Street
inclined toward wicked pencils we stayed
us jamokes quite worn through and bundled
to blow things up beyond all proportion
and crow in wacky dingle a portion of cheek
dried in detonator the telemetry theater
now the cheese quarry its more than human wails
present time now added it's long past time
to get the gargoyles to descend a history of pokers
then someone up near the ceiling he turns and
silence in the Vanguard silence to bring things to
then someone blew it or is this the copper time?

Private Rites of Magic Send the Temple Prostitutes to Sleep; All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The Traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Auden's Birthday Post. Born 119 years ago today. I always post that photo, then Musee Des Beaux Arts (it still gets better with each rereading) and then some version of these paragraphs:

Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

I've told some version of this story countless times: I was hired by Georgetown University mid-August, I sought Hecht out immediately and asked to audit his Fall semester grad poetry class, telling him not only was I only a Georgetown staffer but I hadn't an undergraduate degree and asking please let me audit the class. It focused on five main poets - Frost, Eliot, Auden, Bishop, and Wilbur - but we spent more than half the semester on Auden alone. I've probably spent more time with Auden than with any other poet, and if I only read him now on his birthday, I can pull up countless poems in my head whenever I want.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.







THE FALL OF ROME

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.







THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Those Dutiful Dogtrots Down Airport Corridors

Sitting in the Detroit airport for the flight home as I type this, all flights from Baltimore into Detroit are delayed and all flights to Baltimore possibly but not yet delayed, no explanations offered, so hear: the most shocking development of a happy trip to see my daughter: I expected, anticipated, and prepared for this to be an immersive Modest Mouse vacation, but the reverse happen, I must have already overdosed during the recent binge when hoping to overdose on them this trip, and Destroyer, who I overdose on every Maine vacation, every Michigan vacation, and who I had every intention of avoiding this trip to not deepen my Destoyer slump, came on on Bandcamp shuffle, and I'm addicted again

I provoked no one - it was baseball hat weather, too warm to wear the red hat of last post, which is the only provocation I would have attempted - we LUCKED OUT February in Michigan weather-wise - and despite my son-in-law's cousin's best attempts to bait the big family dinner into political debate (from a centrist Democrat's point of view), no one took the hook. All dirt roads started in packed snow and melted into mud over the five days, Jeep-Americans think they are invincible so they're recklessly dangerous, more hubris than politics I'd bet. No pro-maga signage, no Eff Ice signage, people in stores and restaurants perfunctorily Midwest polite, always a jolt for an East Coaster (and they can identify an East Coaster within two sentences a East Coaster speaks). It's one of the reasons my daughter lives in the Midwest. Too muddy to disc golf though I did explore and found three courses I will play next time I'm here in not-Winter, this one first
 




Yes, the big font is back and it's solely for my eyes. Yes, this a filler post against the rest of this week awaiting me at work. Smaller grid than usual below, partly because I was not online as much, mostly because we seem to have hit a lull in the clusterfuck as I suspect reassessment and replanning on next steps in our immiseration and elimination frantically continuing at Shitlordco. I suspect Dump's dumping himself in an Oval Office press conference and his panicked staff ordering all cameras turned off and all journalists kicked out getting zero mention in major spew-organs opens up vast scenarios for more of Dump's shit, and that ginormous Middle East war all the worse people in the world have boners for. Clusterfuck? Perfectly at home with this dread, dark leaves form a thread

If ICE Pulls You Over, Say These 4 Words Immediately
The Upcoming American Holocaust: Connecting Billionaires, AI, ICE & Trump’s Concentration Camps
Insiders Poised To Profit From Trump’s Deportation Boom
Comply or die			Warehouseification of detention
State of the Apology, 2026					Contempt of Court
The Unreliability of the White Proletariat
The Plot Against American Women
"The regime is now dictating what political views are acceptable to air on television and paramount/cbs are collaborating in that censorship"
The Increasing Attacks on Francesca Albanese Presage a New Dark Age
The Making of the Deportation Machine
What to know about the disastrous Potomac sewage spill
{ feuilleton }			Maggie		You need weirdness
A Landscape Artist in Winter: Andy Goldsworthy
Updike reconsidered >				"It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him"
This was not only a Destroyer vacation, it was a Clientele vacation

ON THE ROAD

John Updike

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors

while gnawing at a Dunkin' Donuts cruller,

those hotel rooms where the TV remote

waits by the bed like a suicide pistol,

those hours in the air amid white shirts

whose wearers sleep-read through thick staid thrillers,

those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts—

such venues of transit grow dearer than home.

The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss,

the dripping faucet and uncut lawn—this is life?

No, vita thrives via the road, in the laptop

whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror,

in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent,

and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide

down through the cloud cover to a single runway

at whose end a man just like you guards the Grail.