War Worm Squirms in the Ear

Alternative jeffhead appropriate for today's mood
Cacopolis Now			America: a Prophecy			Class: today's reminder Duh
View from the Warehouse Floor: murder, defeat, and...
Every election is stolen even if only my vote counts
I’ve lived in a democracy of three the one not the two
I’ve never contested an election (while exercising
my right to moan about results unto perpetuity
unless concessions I have a point(s) are granted)
much less fired bombed their holiest temple
while forcibly evicting families from ancestral homes
Who would I disappear if I had a Tantalus Field?
Not you, elephant poachers, maybe, their
white brown yellow any gendered shitlord patrons posing over the kill
Rhinoceros Mutilator Facilitator Versus Trophy Hunting Sadist Shitlord: Would Jeff? If yes, which first?Your vote counts!
How can I steal this election except by not voting?
Portrait of the United States as a developing country
Who counts as a victim?				Poisoning the planet
#1214	Yes, yesterday was Stanley Elkins birthday

The traditional BLCKDGRD Holy Day Elkin birthday post, 2021 edition (now updated in 2019 by link to another Elkin birthday post, h/t Dan)

Stanley Elkin, born 91 years ago yesterday, one of my Deserted Island Five even though my Deserted Island Five (any island, any time) has dozens and simultaneously none.

Two excerpts I always use for his birthday, read then out loud, please, do it for you. The first captures one of Elkins's major themes, the second is simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking, paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom

SOME PEOPLE LOVE WAR LIKE A SONG

Rochelle Hurt

War as social formula. War spread through word of warmouth. Then it’s war on repeat: war one more time. War, come and hit me. War as pop litany. War under copyright. Room for war sampling. Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war. War worm squirms in the ear, infectious. Can you name that tune—anything but fear. It’s just a war, baby. A very very good war. This war’s off the charts. Check Google: What’s my war rating? Bad news: war’s played out. Now war’s a bore. So take a commercial break, then back to more.

It Was Like Ripping Open the Beehive with My Hands Again

 

I texted the above to Planet in Michigan (and twooted to you), that's Rachel Carson Conservation Park in Unity, Maryland

Planet marveled at the green, Michigan woods still not stirring Spring, it occurred to me as Earthgirl and I for *this* time on *this* hike (because we talk about it on every hike) talked about how much we love where we live that *one* major benefit of splitting time between the states is we would get two Springs a year, two Falls

Forrest Gander has a new volume (sic) out, I'm swinging by Politics and Prose today on way to Hilltop to buy, not only am I self-banned from rereading any novel I'm self-banned from rereading end-to-end chapbooks and books of poetry, here:

I hereby impose a self-ban on pretending to not want to be angry and pretending to feel guilty about it when I am
Why do humans think cats are unfriendly?
Go torture and kill an sentinent being today, it's fun!
The	fuck	is	wrong	with	people	Portrait of the United States as a developing country
The burden before the prince		Nationalism kills			Motherfucking crackers
Of course animals laugh
On centrist vacuousness		Assange		Lying to the ghost in the machine		Quantum music
I discovered yesterday that Major League Baseball changed its extra inning rules and now starts every extra inning with a runner on second base and even though I have lifted my self-ban on enjoying anger I am pleased to announce I can't summon a damn about this
Five characteristics of neoliberalism
Adjunct hell		Peter Hammill in lockdown				{ feuilleton }'s weekly links
The comedy of American communism
A few sentences on every Pynchon novel
The sad and beautiful world of Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous

BECKONED

Forrest Gander

At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language.

Something like a drifting swarm of bees.

At which point in the tetric silence that followed

I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness.

At which point there was no way out for me either.

At which point I carried on in a semi-coma, dreaming I was awake,

avoiding friends and puking, plucking stingers from my face and arms.

At which point her voice was pinned to a backdrop of vaporous color.

At which point the crane's bustles flared.

At which point, coming to, I knew I'd pay the whole flag-pull fare.

At which point the driver turned and said it doesn't need to be

your fault for it to break you.

At which point without any lurching commencement,

he began to play a vulture-bone flute.

At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again.

At which point I conceived a realm more real than life.

At which point there was at least some possibility.

Some possibility, in which I didn't believe, of being with her once more.

Cubeb? He Used to *Smoke* That Stuff

The traditional BLCKDGRD Holy Day Pynchon's Birthday post, he is 84 today:

Have I ever mentioned I love Thomas Pynchon's novels? Here, pages 606-608 Bantam mass market 1974 edition Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's main theme:

     But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust, missing it completely... if that the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks - the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time. each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight's wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, decoding the holy Text.... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it never knew there were any further steps to be taken. Their design was "finalized," and they could forget it.
     It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh, more more.... The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms - it was only staged to look that way - but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are only understood by the ruling elite....
     Yes but technology only responds (how often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk about having the tiger by the tail, but do you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology. deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible - but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harems of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are - "
     We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogeneration, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous planet, waiting for it Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others...

Boatloads more below fold

The Question Is Submitted Through an Encrypted Browser

One of the strangest meetings ever today, a Royal Librarian of Exco Credentials hired and scheduled to debut in person in April 2020 has scheduled meetings with lessers since zoom-shackling to get to know us, she hears so much about us, after every department but circulation she got to my comrades recently and me today.

She seems a decent human and decent humans I'm friends with who think me a decent human vouch that they *think* new RLoEC a decent human. I did not tell her what I think about anything of the library other than I like my tier comrades one and all now now that Scold is gone, I vouch that statement about my comrades is true. 

I vouch this is true. Do you have pets was her first question. Dear Jeff's boss, RLoEC asked, how do I approach Jeff? I like to hike, I'm told you might have suggestions on great local hikes, question two.

She and her husband lived in Bolton Hill two blocks from where Planet and Air lived in Bolton Hill when Planet was at MICA.

If she baited me into that she's shrewder and scarier and demands more respect and is WAY! more likeable than any of my other bosses

Why cats knock shit over!
About that rules based international order
The cracker crucifixition of and bidenite beatification of House of Cheney, thank you for the reminder, my recent allergic reaction to blooming givvafuck abated, where are the cicadas?
It	is	always	decorum	it	is	never	policy
Thankless thoughty thinklets
"Culled"	Avedon Carol's occasional links			Previewing the 2024 Democratic primary
The curse of the zombie book			Thom Gunn's letters			575	Mike Nesmith week
Superwolves my favorite album of 2021 so far, it's not even close

DAY #1101

Daniel Borzutzky

The hospitals are exploding in the middle of the city and they tell us

The dead are not dead and the beach is disappearing

And the sand is disappearing and the lake and the dirty water and the children are disappearing

And the broken parents gamble with their own flesh because they know it has no value

They know their blood has no value      their hair has no value

And they ask the coroner

What can we bury here       there are so many bodies to bury

If we don’t bury them soon

We will need to burn them or toss them into the river

And they ask the police

Are we allowed to mourn here

Has our request to mourn been stamped with the appropriate seals and signatures

Can the authorities confirm we won’t

Be immolated like the excess bodies      like the high schools

Like the sand and the lake and the patients who dissolve on the nightly news

Who char in the Bank of America

Can the authorities confirm who we must pay

In order to mourn the bodies we love

The question is submitted through an encrypted browser

The question is submitted into the blankness of the bureaucracy

Thank you for your question     we will contact you as soon as

We locate an authoritative body

Who has been granted the permission to speak

But and

We need to thank someone because we have not yet been sacrificed like the sand

But and

We need to pay someone because we have not yet been disappeared like the sturgeon

We are not like the drinking water     we have not yet been    contaminated beyond repair

And we are still alive       though leaking with griefshame

And we are still broken    though dripping with griefshame

And our faces feel so hot because they are dying from so much life again

And our faces feel so hot because they are living from so much griefshame

We want to trade ourselves but we don’t know

What we are worth to the operating system controlling the algorithms

Managing who we love     where we live     what we eat and whether or not

Our bodies will be blown into shards rubble ruins remains debris splinters

There is nothing to see here     say the authoritative bodies to the international observers

And it’s true     our mouths are empty

Our eyes are empty

The price of my body is four

The price of my eye is five

The price of my future is twenty-two

There is no meaning for the depository

No rest for the depositor who is buried under the weight

Of the cryptocurrency tying them to a state that is not sovereign

There is no place for the weight of my thigh

I am hungry but there is no place for hunger

I am tired but there is no place for tiredness

Is my blood worth eighteen

Is my sperm worth fourteen

I have kidneys        I have a forceful face that does not know its place

I have a blank mouth that does not know what it can earn on the free market

And when I confess to what the authoritative bodies want me to confess (I live in the wrong body)

My life can’t be verified among all the other lives

All the four-digit codes I give them are connected to accounts that have been closed

All my passwords have vanished

Dollhouse Stimulations of Pigeon-Talking Sales Reps

Nap	joins	us	on	last	night's	long	walk
Neutrality of Alphabetical Order
The criminalization of dissent
Othermuckingfay opscay
Othermuckingfay opscay
Algorithm manipulation
The dream is the mother
Othermuckingfay ackerscray
Othermuckingfay emocratsday
The Washington Football Team will be permanently rebranded the Washington Football Team. The decision has been (shrewdly) made, it is a done deal, I bet you any number of digital pints, I'm flabberghasted by the competence, reminder, fuck ups by design always outnumber fuck ups by malfeasance but don't outnumber fucks ups fucked up deliberately by basic human wiring rewarding the assholiest
Helmetball American, finest metaphor abounding
The most radical statement he has ever read!
I don't know why the outbreak of othermuckingfayness
Joe Biden and America's culture of sadism
It's not the pings, I've been much less othermuckingfay
Vaccine capitalism		Paradigm shifts		Urgent questions		Whose green new deal?
the last month or two and my ping rate has never been higher, thank you
Maggie's weekly links				{ feuilleton }'s weekly links
Work, yes, reading slump yes, force of habit, yes, sudden damn, no
That helmetball rebranding, I can't stop thinking about it, a reminder how deadly competent our shitlords' deliberate incompetence is
MORE NEW GUIDED BY VOICES!

 

 

COMMON

David Rivard

The American common is no collective or princedom

but privacies of need & pleasure as they intersect

in public spaces, tho the insufferable powers that be

breed their plots behind our backs, thinking us

witless, seemingly blind to their afflicted intentions,

just a bunch of demographic motormouths & screw-ups

to be targeted by commodities traders & search engines—

a marketing niche for every need, stereotypes

tagged by algorithms—here is a typical team

of baton twirlers in an airport bar, each of them clad

in foxy red track suits & tuned-in to the dollhouse

stimulations of pigeon-talking sales reps; there

is a previously undetected aggregation of retirees,

evangelical camp kids, kickass bowlers,

and mothy nuns in starched wimples, for whom

the news of the day means the aging boy-man

Hugh Grant's fear of double chins—neither of

these or any other data dump entirely false,

but so narrow-minded sometimes as to lose sight

of us entirely: the midtown lady in Capris,

a four-square surgeon off-duty & headed out

to play poker, the plumber fly-fishing by the river—

a sky of twilight slate now—not a word written on it.