Thursday, June 8, 2023

« wild » fire’s roiling, locust-clouded « our » stampede—as if ignoring a war


That's old, I had cause to think of it. First time I've typed in digital tablet since May 23. I wrote in analog tablet every day since May 23. Here's creepy: between May 23 and June 7 Evernote added a new feature, AI Cleanup. I don't have a hot take on AI and sense I'm not freaked out enough yet and I'm OK with that, I'm fat from the freak out buffet I already wolf down daily. I think it probably a blessing I don't have the scifi gene. I'm a third into Lord Jim and a fourth into Idiot and can't remember the next day what I read the day before, I've never needed bookmarks more than now, I could read the same chapter four days in a row, unaware then dimly aware then you dumbfuck aware. AI. Some day I won't need to tell you three times we are being reprogrammed, we'll talk about something else waiting our turn to be fresh meat ground in an abattoir




As I type this New Yorkers advised to not go outside and if they must wear a mask because of Canadian wildfires' smoke, in DC it's the brightest foggy day I've ever seen. Polar icepacks are melting. Did you know that the day I typed this the heat index in parts of Puerto Rico was 125 degrees fahrenheit? Remember how once upon by June 1st yards twinkled with fireflies? Where I live as I type this is six inches short of rain for the year, a friend and colleague who's a rabid gardener and brings me her just-off-the-vine tomatoes I eat, juice running down my chin, like apples, tells me local apple crops two weeks to shittier quality and six weeks to failure without multiple days of saturating rain. The bad El Niño predicted for this Summer hasn't started yet and is predicted to be worse in 2024. Enjoy this Summer. If you make it to next Summer next Summer is gonna suck. Reminder: AI funded by shitlords who never want to talk to much less encounter in any fashion any fucking not-dead-yet peasant again




Two above new PJ Harvey songs off an album out in August. Been thinking about musicians and bands and authors and poets I once liked, loved, revered. Who aged first, me or he/she/they/them? Who broke it off most, that most important +.0001st of every relationship? Exhibit One: Talking Heads. Is it me tiring of the music, another I don't ever need to hear any Beatles songs EVER AGAIN except George's *Northern Song* (and even that not so much now) and *All Too Much* or learning (or more accurately confirming what I suspected) that Bryne an ick human? Anyway, I've always, still do, and hope to always love PJ Harvey though why she drops off my radar now and then solely my what the fuck was I talking about, the two songs above new, and two earlier Polly Jean below and yowza. Maybe I should type in digital table more, maybe I shouldn't, and copy/pasting from evernote to blooger every fart the fucking hassle I deserve





Unlike dogs, our feline friends are barely different from their wild ancestors
Cornel West Announces He is Running for President
The expected dismissal and derision was strongest in my tesla timeline not from professional Democrats, a few bothered, but from professional philosophers with academic scaffolding and wrap-up PhD thesis soon-to-be-adjunct faculty wage slaves, as I should have bet you infinite digital pints it'd be
Cornel West Announces He is Running for President
*Should* West gain ANY traction, *then* the professional Democrats bone-sawing begins, they'll Khashoggi his ass
Idle rich baffled by poor people's distaste for dangerous, low-paying jobs
The Demon in America's Sacred Narrative
He hates the Russians and says let the blood flow
No - Such Propaganda Delusions Will Not Win The War
A thoroughly dishonest and cynical apology for Ukrainian fascism, past and present.
Congress likely to hide defense spending in new Ukraine aid bill
More Than Half of America’s 100 Richest People Exploit Special Trusts to Avoid Estate Taxes
They can't stress enough, both parties want a police state & are doing all in their power to hasten one
The fake news about Fake News
Boiling Brook Pkwy one of the weirdest secret roads in Moco and this shopping center THE weirdest secret shopping center in Moco
An Illustrated Guide to Mouth Gestures and Their Meanings Around the World
New (Eno-produced) Peter Gabriel song
Four decades ago a new Peter Gabriel album would be cause for celebration but then he put out So and I said goodbye (the current bald man face-mullet doesn't effect the music but please)
"Close Readings” of New York School Poets — Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch (and Much More)






*

Miriam Bird Greenberg

Whole towns like • horses turnt loose in the bardo of •
« wild » fire’s roiling, locust-clouded « our » stampede—as if
ignoring a war two counties over meant it couldn’t come
closer—plague-black | ened forests consumed by a burnt
• wind: « and untamable » a lithe and lumbering creature cities-
sized, mitosis-prone, come to lick clean the tinder « tender
ly » face of village mid-stampede. Caressing • lost wedding
pictures, kitchen tables, • dogs lured in « runaway » terror in
to the inferno, it leaps roads in its roving. Whole towns re
made over • and far • in « night » parking lots where « away »
wander once-middle-class refugees the fire’s made. Atop
an RV, a parrot’s perched, and for its human from whom
it’s learned, its gift: Fuck you. Its every world of instinct • breach
ed, and black « trust- » its human-made ruin. Hello?

Monday, June 5, 2023

While a Pinned-up PSYOPS Leaflet Declares, *If You Sleep in a Cemetery, You’re Bound to Have Nightmares*

Maybe me and my ennui with me and ennui with me versus the clusterfuck, but it seems to me we tribal anger addicts are being fed less mwork since the limp season finale of Debt Ceiling Doomsday. Summer, yes, and the last summer before next summer which will suck, psyops-wise, I vouch only for me. Here's the latest on my left eye

Even top shitlord psyop idiot savants (and the coding idiot savants that deposit in your eager ear our shitlord psyop idiot savants' daily doses) need vacations too (and not depositing daily doses a daily dose unto itself, yo), why not vacation in June 2023, they'll be busy June 2024. Summer 2024, you think you are being reprogrammed now, wait till next summer, I am telling you three times next summer is gonna suck. Here's the latest on my right eye


Yes, I've been lazy, you haven't noticed but the blogrolls need weeding and the dead or just slumbering need dug out of active rolls and buried in dead rolls, I'll get to it or not, this is both an appealing and frightening development in my damn. Meanwhile, directly below: my review (and current state of my head, I'm happy, it's fantastic and appalling) of the new Pere Ubu album, the funnest, brightest, ubuiest Pere Ubu album since 2013's *Lady from Shanghai,* go bandcamp it now

For instance:




L & I will never not have cats
The Disinformation Wars: An Epistemological, Political, and Socio-Historical Interrogation
The Democrats got the Republicans to do for them what they deny to themselves they always wish to do: Kick the poors
Building a mass movement to stop Cop City
You will be jailed for protesting Cop City
if you're not first murdered for protesting Cop City
If the Police Can Decide Who Qualifies as a Journalist, There Is No Free Press
The Big Deception: the biggest lie
Lockheed Martin Boosts Earnings Outlook Citing Billions Of Innocent People Still Left To Kill
The Anti-Anti-Semitism Follies
The Other Side of the Needle’s Eye
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Beggars and billionairesEast Moco blows
A shitlord bankrolling cop city, or: NEVER shop Home Depot
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL
If you aren't daily checking out Doom & Gloom from the Tomb, do, yo
Hey! there's new Hey Colossus!
{ feuilleton }'s weeklyElucidation





THE ADVANCE

Tom Sleigh

Out the barred window sandbags
in a sagging wall surround the guard post
where a soldier half-hidden by the flag
holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost.

It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise
off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps
pulled tight over the troop trucks.
Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys,

telling some joke in Arabic
in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”:
I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations,

the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room
while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares,
If you sleep in a cemetery, you’re bound to have nightmares.

2

No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small
and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy,
the head is its own country
obstinately surviving, the pupil

of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure
transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic,
long-legged thighs almost like
an obscenity the eye watches over —

no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks
from tank-treads scarring the concrete
to give any of   it drama — and what

about the way the lips’ frozen smirk
keeps daring me to touch the sexless V
between the thighs staring up at me?

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Glass Eye That Stares at Me in Amazement from the Bronze Mantel

L found five must paint sites in Allegeny and Garrett Counties for her week-long plein air competition: the overlook top of Town Hill on Scenic 40 near Flintstone, an abandoned silk factory in Lonaconing, an abandoned paper mill in Luke, along the Savage River near Avinton and, because I made a wrong turn and accidentally turned around there, at the ridge line of Big Savage Mountain, windmills, giant, up close. 

West Augusta be beautiful. Cumberland is shriekingly ghost town gorgeous. Freaking goth gorgeous. Effing Depression gorgeous. The house L will stay in, amazing, we could buy two and a half of them there selling our Cape Cod here, lordy. Sunday's blaze, Long Pond Trail, Green Ridge State Forest:





No report from the breakfast lounge of the Frostburg Quality Inn, I'd forgot how much I hate staying in hotels, we Maine and Michigan in houses, today in my complicity. Besides the orange blazed trail, we hiked trails blazed sky blue, blue blue, white, and red. I fill with as much spiritual wonder over tree blazes as I do over road route signage, old-timers here can vouch. Hey, I seem to be able to write again but all I want to write about is my painting, so no surprise that I paint blazes, I just typed the abridged version why




All you need to know about climate change
Misogyny and Violence in Michigan, my future residence
TORTURER AND FUTURE PRESIDENT
Targeting Revolutionaries: The Birth of the Carceral Warfare Project, 1970–78
America’s Becoming a Suicide Pact
Capitalism is a value-decoding machine
Fake kindness, Caring and Symbolic Violence
Duh, but valuable reminder: Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This
How elite hobbies let billionaires pay no tax
How to Humiliate an Economist
Betrayal is a Democratic Party tradition
Death penalty for homelessness
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL
Durasantis has been poisoning him with tiny doses of Veridium Six in the Diet Coke. There is no cure
The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma
Hidden DogmatismDereliction of duty
The liberal complacency of Martin Amis
Blaze I made above the head of a foolbody self-portrait
{ feuilleton }'s weeklySonnet machine



THE PROBLEM OF ANXIETY

John Ashbery

Fifty years have passed
since I started living in these dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fluff.


Suppose this poem were about you - would you
put in the things I've carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that's
all in some book it seems. For you
I've saved the descriptions of chicken sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.

Thursday, May 25, 2023

Ridiculous How the Space Between 3 Violins Can Threaten Our Poetry

Monday past I wondered what will kill me first: nuclear incineration, death by cracker, death by cop/military (who is just a cracker in an official uniform (as compared to vigilante crackers cosplaying as cops in camo)), death by a schizophrenic's AR-15, or death by natural (and human-aided) disaster, and again reminded myself it's me who makes myself sideways, as kneejerk and spastic as when I sing out loud the famous "But you blew my mind" line everytime I hear Roxy's *In Every Dreamhome, A Heartache:* my devout faith in metaphors based solely on my owning the single worst singing voice in human history, L can vouch I both sing the line and that my voice horrifies

We drive to Allegheny and Garrett counties tomorrow. the two most western counties of Augusta, the cracker counties that want to secede from Maryland, whose economic driver are the multiple Maryland state prisons filled with inmates from Baltimore City and Baltimore County (inner suburbs), northern Anne Arundel and Prince Georges and Montgomery (east of Georgia Avenue and south of Randolph Road), the feeder counties *not* joining Augusta. L is one of 30 people out of 2500 that applied for big plein air event based in Cumberland that got invited, she's thrilled.We will be driving through Westernport and Luke, Oakland and Accident and Friendsville and Frostburg and Grantsville and Cumberland - Cumberland is freaking beautiful. We're taking the long weekend to scout out where and what she wants to paint and hike new trails. There may be a report (with photos) of what we saw posted from the breakfast lounge of a mid-range hotel for the first time in a long while

After Monday's what-will-kill-me meditation I bought concentric metal cookee cutters so I can paint circles from inside as well as outside, best anti-sideways plan since he last until the next needed sniper nest, so yes, no links today and yes, my ferris wheel's gondola almost topping where boys' just-dropping balls squeal delicious uh-oh, wait, this is odd, there's a new Guided by Voices song?





CANTATA

Jack Spicer

Ridiculous
How the space between three violins
Can threaten all of our poetry.
We bunch together like Cub
Scouts at a picnic. There is a high scream.
Rain threatens. That moment of terror.
Strange how all our beliefs
Disappear.

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Until One of Our Daughters Shouted: "It Was Right in Front of You, Right in Front of Your Eyes, and You Didn't See

That's my right eye. My congressman in Maryland, who cosplays as a progressive, yesterday tweeted out, playing his role in this shitlord kabuki, in support of Biden invoking the 14th Amendment to defeat maga efforts to gut social programs via extorting concessions from Biden re: debt ceiling, and I retweeted, adding, "primary Biden or shut the fuck up, poseur," which advice I'm sure he'll take and declare tomorrow just after voting to send another trillion dollars to war profiteers via Laundromat Ukraine (which he digs - to be fair, all Maryland elected officials, by coincidence and consequence of location, never turn a military dime down). 

I was being sarcastic, of course: there would be not change at the top if Raskin was potus. and Raskin's is too far up the colon of the Democratic Party's ladder match (he wants to be Speaker, it's the deal he made with MFDMHQ (who will never make him Speaker), bet you a digital pint he doesn't run for Cardin's senate seat) to be anything but a House shitlord tick. This is my left eye


Step 1 is learning that minds are very hackable, and are being hacked constantly at mass scale.
If only someone had been yodeling constantly and annoyingly for seemingly decades that he was telling you three times we are being reprogrammed
Media And Politicians Throw So Much Bullshit At Us That It Is Difficult To See Through It
Today's finest metaphor abounding about mthrfckng Democrats
The Increasing Exploitation and Robbery of the U.S. Working Class
Fade to black in Ukraine"After two-plus years of “Joe Biden” — well, our country is bypassing the banana republic stage of dissolution and depravity and steaming quickly into a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia of financial, social, psychological and moral ruin. Every official utterance is a lie. Everything’s broken or breaking. And seemingly, on-purpose. The nagging question, of course, is on whose purposes?"
How American weaponized the West
Rigged Capitalism and the Rise of Pluto-populism
Excess, Success, and Happiness under Capitalism
Tell me again me I need to be more tolerant of crckrchrstrs
Tell me again me I need to be more tolerant of mthrfckng pgs
Today in mthrfckng helmetball and crckrs
Today in mthrfckng Democrats: Virginia senator and former vpotus candidate adamant Democrats not craven, just incredibly stupid
What difference does a river make?
Maggie's weeklyFRESH HELL
Avedon Carol's occasional links
Your big box of terror weekend
{ feuilleton }'s weekly#1381Monstrous
This is not a review of Fernanda Melchor’s This Is Not Miami
New Diane Seuss poem!Why didn't you tell me Rancid Sassy had relocated, especially you, Normal Papi?
37 albums in 40 years and 38th drops in July
NEW BONNIE PRINCE BILLY!






POSTSCRIPT

Marie Howe

What we did to the earth, we did to our daughters
one after the other.

What we did to the trees, we did to our elders
stacked in their wheelchairs by the lunchroom door.

What we did to our daughters, we did to our sons
calling out for their mothers.

What we did to the trees, what we did to the earth,
we did to our sons, to our daughters.

What we did to the cow, to the pig, to the lamb,
we did to the earth, butchered and milked it.

Few of us knew what the bird calls meant
or what the fires were saying.

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.
The air turned red.    The ocean grew teeth.