You Wood Have Too Oracle Snow

I'm not dark but I am shadow and am foreshadowed by how every day feels exactly like the last but worse plus one and how I know today how tomorrow will feel plus one shittier. I never believed a post-election relenting of Trump's assholosity, his crackers' batshittery, of Democrats' motherfuckerality, of plague's inevitable tides, of our shitlords' sociopathic anthroposuicide, of Napoleon's just diagnosed severe and possibly late-stage heart disease, o wait, that one's new, we'll know more after his next appointment this coming Friday when his heart is xrayed and cat EKGed and we'll need possibly make a decision about how many months he has left or not, we wouldn't have known if he hadn't been wounded by another cat or a fox or a coyote or a nail under a porch or shed, I only took him in this past Saturday to get the wound clean, verify he was up-to-date on rabies shots, the vet saw the heart-disease signs instantly, telling me they are subtle and slow and hard to pick up when you see the cat every day, the vet neutral in prognosis ahead of more tests but certain in his diagnosis, and blood work drawn that day has confirmed, strange, the news on Napoleon feels like the standard assholosity and batshitterry and motherfuckerality and plague tides and daily anthroposuicide that has always existed and will always exist, we talked about this on Sunday's hike when we hadn't heard yet on Nap's bloodwork but assumed the inevitable dreariest worse, what we know tomorrow will feel like

• Winter woods are prettiest, it's not even close, today first day of Winter, climate-wise
• And then I think back to our recent observations Nap's much more yard-centric, comes in house at night when temperature drops below forty, much more talkative and needy and cuddly 
• UPDATE! Cats with humans
• My short twittertirade about public school teachers cause I'm cutting and pasting: What angers me is never even suggested is that public school teachers should be third, fourth in line for vaccines.
  
• We're hopelessly and righteously pro-public school teacher biased for obvious personal reasons but also because we lucked out with some of our teachers. I am still astonished, though I understand why, how disrespected they are.
• From unipolarity to multipolarity
• Why is my curriculum white?
• Avedon Carol's occasional links
• The daily shittier: I've already processed Napoleon's death, mourned, gotten over, I am telling you three time we are being retrained, the fuck with me abandoning that refrain
• I will still buy you a copy of Vollmann's *The Dying Grass* if you want one 
• I tweeted: Biden's team wants the last tiny wafer too, great moral goal is to hit the vomit buckets +.06% more accurately than Trump's team, greater accuracy in aim
  
• A year ago today the post starred Fleabus (she's good, bce) please do it for you for the Anne Carson poem and when you read it out loud read it out loud loud

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

John Ashbery

exurb. What were you driving at (when you said): Used to joke I’m in the retirement business. The snow is beginning to fall again. I’m wondering whether I should go out. How can you give orders when nobody is listening? A friend and two boys. Here where love was quiet it was possible to think discontinuously of the folds ahead, faith on a tricycle. Only it. Or she got a hole in her dress. It was a million to one it was something bad. The windows rattled as the train swept through at breakfast.

You may want to rethink that decision. Bother the others… It was right there in his military book. You wood have too oracle snow. You knew that. Everybody did. My dynasty, confessions of a lily from wire. That was a terrible thing to do purely naked. Groveling conditions apply, not to go all agony aunt on you. You’re not ready for this. No poet is, only you already came. The crane doesn’t know if the weather will return. I don’t want it. I don’t give a shit. Something that would have fell…the potato orchard with attached oriental kitchen.

They don’t say please in heaven. All business is carried out in the pre-noon hours, leaving time for naps and reflection. This is the kind of life I was supposed to lead. What happened? you ask. Cutie pie went bye bye. Once the hypnotic hour of twelve has struck you are like any other paying guest, waiting for the intoxicating smell of burgers to waft up the stairway. When Doc moved back to our area he noticed the wretched smiles, legacy of our previous god. Who, he wondered, enjoys this kind of ambiance. And sure enough, it was Independence Day. And word went out: It’s the right day but the wrong month. Go back to sleep. And they did (writing in the grass). The Fuller Brush man (clean-jawed) stopped by. See you down there. Lemme know. Just because Scooby Doo thinks you should…

Dirt officials implied a small little BOMB. And sleep, trying to find them. Now I approve not just initiative A-13 but the whole dumb panoply, Uncle Ralph. Sign me up for festooned. They say she was last seen by a lake, crying.

You knew that. Everybody did.

to ask more from some incompetent..... laughs

• Poor rural whites are dying of covid while denying the disease exists (apathy is a disease) and BlackRock enjoys a profitable pandemic
• I think the health threat real but I've an 88 year old father, I work at a university, my wife and daughter are public school teachers, I worry the worse-case simultaneously aware of the work
  
• I'm positive our shitlords have been, are, and will continue to monetize this plague (and employ the most brilliant and hopefully (for them) equally amoral actuaries, algorithmists, accountants, and assholes to study the current plague for more squeezable drops of blood, yes, but more to learn how to monetize the next plague better). Perhaps I've mentioned this in like sentences before.

 

 

We drove to Bucklodge Conservancy Friday and Little Bennett yesterday, we exit 270 north at Maryland 121, Exit 18, Clarksburg for both, on the west side of northbound 270 in Clarksburg is an outlet store eyesore and disgrace (but not as big a disgrace as what developers have done to and worse have planned for beautiful rolling farm land), the parking lots were full both days, the line to exit onto 121 south towards the outlets backed up almost to 270, and getting onto 270 south on way home we could see the outlet's poorly designed and worse executed roundabouts jammed and blocking through traffic, of course, I think of that same song too every time, that's Little Bennett above and below, I found Earthgirl's trolls she'd enshrined in a tree knob on Tobacco Farm Trail at Little Bennett about six months ago, missing a month ago, I saw what looked like cotton candy at tree bottom, tiny happy needed miracle, both reinstalled

 

• Mocotrails have many tree knob and tree hollow shrines, it's very cool
  
• A poem about my complicity
• Anewpoem
• So yes, our shitlords are worse than the plague, I can't kill the first, don't want to die of the latter  
• The bioweapons of culture war
  
• Your president-elect
• Your obamassasinated candidate 
  
• Spigot wars
• Your president-elect
• This week's music from my shelves and crates deliberately sought out, there's new Cabaret Voltaire, the song above the poem, I went looking for my old Cab Volt
  

 

• Final assault on the living planet
• Why twitter is (epistemically) better than facebook
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Rereading Eno's diary
  
• Bobby just fell down the elevator shaft and Dhalgren I've failed, or at least set aside, it's boring, it's a fucking lecture, though I did read and love Ohle's Motorman, I had not heard of it but now recognize how often it has been riffed on, alluded to, and ripped off in fiction written after it I read before I read it
• I *almost* love Cab Volt, I thoroughly respect and deeply like Cab Volt
  

POEMS, SUNRISES, AND PRECEDENTS

Ed Roberson

On sonnet form

times even in the grip of  trouble

get no less a sunrise than sun is capable

the capable beauty all we have

to expect—     to ask more from some incompetent   laughs

at the proposition          we have trumped all that

from such horses as

we have     pulling our wagon through the dust

which we   ourselves yoked to the lead     that trust—

people of  the voice though we were.

people who cannot figure

what it is we want to say  for us—

if  all we have is the form to stuff

as the end      then any poem of the times comes up

capable as shining.     shining or not.     enveloped.

Grope for Moist Souvenirs in the Basement

The traditional five slowest days of the Blegsylvanian year start today, I've a bleggalgaze, as in not just *this* blag, it's important not to post bleggalgazes at any time but especially when I *want* to, and (update) I want to, though I will say current plans do not include compulsory cursing at Democrats in multiple variations of What Did You Fucking Expect from Motherfucking Neoliberal Corporate Warmongers, though of course I do today and will 

Also too: Last reminder that between blooger and me a blogroll got eliminated, there is a new one below Doctor Sevrin, Also too, I know I didn't remember everyone offed in the elimination, I've added the few I do, and there're totally new places to visit too, if I accidentally killed you please let me know. 

Also too, the house to our right has two new kittens, the woman who owns the house rents out rooms to people in their twenties, maskless people come and go (peaceably, quietly, this is not a complaint about loud parties until three in the morning), dozens of maskless people hold and cuddle and breathe on these kittens and these kittens immediately knew I am a cat-whisperer and want to be my buddy, they run to tell me every time I leave the house, I talk to them, don't touch them not out of fear for my health but by the request of loved ones and out of respect for the health of said loved ones, so damn, but here's *Your* Thanksgiving Olive loaf

• Shithole oligarchy
• Yes, global financial crises inevitably reinforce capitalism
• I can't imagine I could if I *wanted* to stop barking at our shitlords (which is why I want want to stop compulsively cursing at motherfucking Democrats who are only doing their job)
• Hillary approves
• Centrist Democrats *are* right-wing
• The wound that never heals: Lacan meets Trump
• Scapegoating to unity
• The bullshit whiteness of the hillbilly
• Mad MAGA men
• Olive, I should write an olivegaze
• I did not know of Johannes Göransson until yesterday, not saying it's love, saying I climbed two flights of stairs from the floor of the office I type this sentence and found one of two collections Göransson supposedly owned and in stacks by the Library, not saying it's love but it's a one night stand at least
• UPDATE! 2020 November 27
  

 

DEAR TOURISTS

Johannes Göransson

Dear Tourists,

You can grope for moist souvenirs in the basement,

but you'll need patience

because nobody down there will warn you about the floor.

In the street you'll find squirrels; on my scalp, bumps.

If you want proof for the folks back home that you've surged

like a seagull, print your name and number in the bathroom.

If you want a seagull for a pet, talk to my therapist.

If you find her, tell me where she lives, and where her daughter

goes to school. If you want a piece of me, suck my dick.

If you want to sell trips to the general public, take my pulse

or my coffee-table picture-books about Italy.

If there's a house in the trees, throw up a hammer

and see what falls down. The bleeding kid isn't

the best prize and you can't return it, so be careful where

you walk when you've had a few.

If there's a nettle between your shoulder blades

and you're having trouble breathing, tell the teacher,

but don't tell her it was me cause it wasn't.

I was just watching, maybe even laughing at your gurgling sounds.

That incident belongs to somebody else's amusement park.

I don't ever want to see it again on this side of the blunt tracks.

Flies Beyond the Park and Far Beyond the Discords of the Wind

Jinxed: Dhalgren's turning into a M-W-F 8am lecture, jinxed: I'll never bump pOj on twooter again, jinxed: buy property, car breaks down, not jinxed: driving less hiking more, below, yesterday Beloved Seneca at Berryman Road big curve

 

• What did the Democrats win? The View from Top of NYRB Village
• Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit
  
• How Science ignores the living world
• The uniqueness of mammals
• A singular philosophy  
• The new pathologized authoritarianism
• When all politics isn't personal
• Jinxed: better Fall foliage means beech trees drop more leaves, less yellow in winter woods, fine metaphors abound

 

• Winter woods still prettiest
• Know your enemies
• Spot any not inadvisable application
• Maggie's weekly links
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• The social ontology of art under capitalism
• Poems about the business of being a poet
• Paphian = Adjective. Paphian (not comparable) (literary) Pertaining to love or sexual desire, especially when illicit. [ from 16th c.] Of or relating to Paphos, the mythical birthplace of the goddess of love on the island of Cyprus
• How Joyelle McSweeney became a prophetess
• Jinxed: say last post there will be lots of Dischord this post, forget until just before finished post, still, here's one:

INVECTIVE AGAINST SWANS

Wallace Stevens

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

And far beyond the discords of the wind.

 

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks

The death of summer, which that time endures

 

Like one who scrawls a listless testament

Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

 

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon

And giving your bland motions to the air.

 

Behold, already on the long parades

The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

 

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

Then He Asks for the Special Lotion

I'm wrung, Trump (absolutely yes) (als0 2wo: in his own martyrmind His 2024 Restoration) and Crackers and Biden and Motherfucking Democrats-wise (I.H.M.D.), that last link...

Algorithmicists, deployed to harvest data so shitlords can develop best training practices for rubes like us, have vast new data sets on election voter behavior under constant poke and prod and shock and plague to sift like whales suck brit, Chapter 58, we each have our own bible

SeatSix could corpshorthand for you the former, thank you, I analog laughed out loud for the first time since the last time, just wait for the next generation of psyops 

Bought three just dropped albums on Bandcamp *last* Bandcamp Friday, now that I have a mortgage on land in Michigan I self-impose a Bandcamp quarantine on myself for sixteen more minutes, this new William Basinski

 

• UPDATE! 2020 November 21
  
• Worst. Shift. Ever.
  
• Death Wish
• You're being couped 
• How America ends
  
• The Silenced Majority
• Biden's left derangement syndrome 
  
• Rotwelsch and the language police
  
• Social democracy or feudalism
• Hiring propagandists take one, take two
  
• Triskelions betting on Thralls
• Triskelions  
• Scratch Tucker from 2024 consideration
  
• Meet the censored
• Glenmont, I have a good ibrarylay colleague who graduated from Kennedy
  
• The Plot and the Argument - Philosophy as a Narrative Affair

 

 

• New EP of Lambchop covering others, what I like I love what I don't there's a button for that
  
• Jinx: I have shunted aside all fiction but Delany's Dahlgren, I'm more surprised than you
• A bad novel within the bad novel of the plague year
• Kaminsky talks with Wiman about kairological time
• Wiman, when a poet is good but religion is not faith and me, and I know and OK but
  
• Prose poetry versus lyric poetry
  
• Forty years of Dischord - this weekend's futile weekend blugpast will feature Dischord bands not called Fugazi: living in just-outside DC Maryland in the 80s and 90s one of major blessings of my life  
• (Dead) birds of America
• Strongly recommend:
  

 

 

EVERYBODY WHO IS DEAD

Frank Stanford

When a man knows another man

Is looking for him

He doesn’t hide.

He doesn’t wait

To spend another night

With his wife

Or put his children to sleep.

He puts on a clean shirt and a dark suit

And goes to the barber shop

To let another man shave him.

He shuts his eyes

Remembers himself as a boy

Lying naked on a rock by the water.

Then he asks for the special lotion.

The old men line up by the chair

And the barber pours a little

In each of their hands.

The Thrum Escaped the Darkness of the Drum

We bought thirteen acres of undeveloped fields and woods of a former farm in Dexter Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan, a perfect twenty minutes away from my daughter's house, and roughly ten miles away from Ann Arbor, an hour, hour and a half from Detroit, traffic depending, near trails mostly flat but in the woods, a disc golf course five minutes by car, half an hour by walk (I've seen the baskets, haven't played, haven't played period since before the plague and months before that, the fuck wrong with me). If I build a course on the acres if you buy me a basket I'll print and post a nice Michigan winter-protected sponsorship sign thanking you, if you get in first the signature hole can be Your Name Memorial Hole

My single goal is if I must be a Michigan citizen it's not until 2025 (and is the rough timeline), I have no desire to live in a state where my vote counts for more than the nothing it counts for in Maryland, by 2028 nobody's vote will matter

This van was parked on campus last Friday, saw the slogan before I knew I can build a disc golf course in Michigan (yes, purpled out, this would be a stupid thing to get hassled over even though in praise of Serendipity)

Nothing more imminent, I love where I live now, and not just because my vote doesn't matter here, this an investment in an eventual future

Reminder: between me and blugger a blegroll disappeared, and now blugger be broken, can't add new blags to blegrolls, until it's fixed please (a) remind me if you were on that blegroll and (b), like Mongo did the day before yesterday, email me if you have a new post

UPDATE! Just was able to add a new bligrall down below Doctor Sevrin's ear from the layout page, bark at me you site, effing blooger seems to have fixed the issue

• Obamamotherfucker's music taste is as shitty as you'd expect
• His royal motherfuckingness
• Yes, and is Reason Two for the ratfuckery
• Biden's embrace of Trump's ratfuckery
• Why the military establishment backed Biden
• The incoherence of Biden's platitudes
• Smarter than a box of rocks
• I suffered, therefore so must others
• An archeology of resistance
• I will take 95 degrees with a heat index of 104 ten out of ten days versus one day of any day colder than 40 with wind greater than 10 mph, give or take
• Your eyes during plague
• I wish my daughter lived in Not-Michigan
• Berryman's Ball Poem
• I like but don't love Cabaret Voltaire, there's a new album (and Kirk interview)
• Three new G.C. Waldrep poems
• Reading JR
• On poets and prizes
• Apocalypse
• The Clean on the Flying Nun sound!
• This is wonderful:
  
  

SIX REVISIONS

Jane Huffman

The doctor holds my chest against the discus, listens like the fish below the ice listens to the fisherman. “Medicine,” he says, “is not an exact science.”

He listens like the ice fisherman listens to the fish. I breathe into a nebulizer and think about translation—inexact art. A fine, particulate mist.

Snow has fallen on
still-green grass,
daubed with yellow leaves.

___

Three takes on a line from St. Augustine’s Confessions. An acquaintance posted one online to the delight of followers, of us, and in delight, I went to the source, the lexicon: three alike, online translators, some fishy, copied, pasted, fished out of the public sphere. And each rings like a different key.

Snow has fallen
on [yellow] grass, daubed with
[still-green] leaves.

___

Poor old pear-thief Augustine, half-biographer:

     1. “Where should my heart flee to in escaping from my heart?”
     2. “Where could my heart flee to in escaping from my heart.” [sic]
     3. “For where could my heart flee from my heart?”

[Grass] has fallen
on [still-white snow] daubed
with [yellow] leaves.

___

In the first translation is a hammering. “Should”—a moral judgment. An oiled object laid bare on a linen bed. “Shouldn’t” tied around the “should” with butcher’s string.

In the second, a yip, a certainty, desperate in its forwardness. “Where could?” as if the possible eluded him. To boot, denied its final mark. The thought falling from “Where could?” like rain from a cloud, a vanishing source.

Grass has fallen
on [yellow] snow daubed
with [snow-white] leaves.

___

“This will cut the cough off  from the brain,” the doctor says, offers me a tiny cup of codeine-orange syrup. The ache escapes like orange silk out of my orange lung. I slide into a mirror of my feelings, my face enlarged, expanding like a sponge. I grab at it.

The doctor says, “I lost it in the war.” He is talking about his thumb.

[Yellow leaves have] fallen
on [white] snow daubed
with [still-green grass].

_____

In the third Augustine translation is a thrum: “For / where / could / my / heart / flee / from / my / heart?” The thrum escaped the darkness of the drum. No “to” this time. The “to” escaped the darkness of the “from.”

Yellow leaves have fallen
on [green grass] daubed
with still-[white snow].

Notes:

Quotation sources, in order of appearance: 1. Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991); 2. A misprint of the Chadwick translation, transcribed on an online resource; and 3. Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown with translations by Michael Walsh (University of California Press, 1967).