That is one of two Beatles songs, the other George's too, I actively seek out to listen again. Also too, a reminder that the best Traveling Wilburys song is a George song
I hadn't forget when reminded by Landru Beloved an hour ago but I do confess I forgot until mid-morning, George, I always loved best, people can vouch, born seventy-eight years ago today
That's my favorite George song, and a reminder that *All Things Must Pass* is by far the second most listened to album in my lifetime and it's catching up to number one and will pass it by 2042 at this pace
I had to reboot the new modem for the first time and blinking orange light turned Jesus has risen white, but now my laptop is sworn to a fuck named Jeff and can't log on to the wifi at work, wifi's allegiance to Jeff, Jeff Xfinity aka Jeff Comcast real name Jeff Finemetaphorsabound
and we have an address, it came with our property tax bill, either Lima Township numbers its property numbers in increments of four or we'll have to walk across someone's property to get to the other part of ours
My North Face heavy duty right sling, I think of it as left since I only see it from behind the backpack, ripped 4/5ths off, saw it before the 1/5th broke and backpack flung I need a new laptop. Weeded essentials and nice-to-haves from garbage out of broken North Face's guts, transferred organs to grey-red Timbuk2, not a backpack backpack but a laptop backpack that can double as a briefcase, it's great those five unique minutes every four years when I don't want a backpack backpack because my backpack backpack I had to put to sleep. I've beem resorting the same baseball cards fifty-five years
I found my lost collected Weldon Kees searching what organs I'd left last time I abandoned Timbuk2 because while a great laptop backpack it doesn't even pretend to be a backpack backpack, I found my beloved and thought lost (I did look for it, I did!) then tweeted out a photo of the book then tweeted out his short poem *Turtle*
I get the new Ishiguro next week, I guarantee I'll fail it and will be unable to tell with anywhere near certainty how much of it will be my fault and how much the novel's. His last novel, Buried Giant, read when I always had a novel working, mehhed me, I pretend to have a novel always working now but in truth I fail every novel I start. My eyes, my head, my concentration, my damn, I'm old yes but there's more. Calls into question my current wonderfully bountiful poem readings, my eyes, my head, my concentration, my damn, my performance of myself for myself. And now something to look forward to in these days of not looking forward to anything fills me with dread because I don't trust nothing to look forward to that I will sabotage by filled grids like this one.... I want to be slayed right know I'll be slayed wrong
Bleggalgaze: grid forever until not, if I lost the cloud, medumbmotherfucker ...
When the coal
Gave out, we began
Burning the books, one by one;
First the set
Of Bulwer-Lytton
And then the Walter Scott.
They gave a lot of warmth.
Toward the end, in
February, flames
Consumed the Greek
Tragedians and Baudelaire,
Proust, Robert Burton
And the Po-Chu-i. Ice
Thickened on the sills.
More for the sake of the cat,
We said, than for ourselves,
Who huddled, shivering,
Against the stove
All winter long.
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. 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.
I am nobody is my anthem, catechism, most fervent belief. I build domino chains of rationalization explaining why I explain everything rather than write anything. There are nights I should not write and this is one of them or at least not write haiku, which have saved me hundreds of syllables, I measure once cut once not like the guy made of resiliency in the Federal Credit Union radio commerical on WTOP in an ice storm who measures twice. Limbaugh and Larry King - youngsters, my first car had an AM radio an antenna like a cat whisker, if you are like me and like any sound but the sound of a car I NEED SOMETHING COMING OUT OF THE SPEAKERS best shitty better than no shitty. I had jobs with shifts ending ten eleven midnight, I'd drive moco backroads, that's when it started. Larry King radio interviews driving Big Woods Road from 109 to 28, was him or Art Bell, King, then, by a lot, and I yodeled about Limbaugh's cracker-whispering skills twelve years before my first stupidass blog when he went full Fort Marcy, most talented talk radio host I ever heard. I fall asleep trying to remember Frederick County roads like I'm pretty sure I know the way out of my neighborhood now. Then I remember I am nobody and it's my anthem. Lipsyncher me me again then me for umpth time one two three four five, life in the fuck it despondancy ocene, my dead watercolor palette, I swear the Q and A were a happy accident I'm not correcting
<< A friend asked, in the context of humans on this Earth, if I thought anything is possible. I said yes, thinking she thought like I did that anything *horrible* is possible, never considering anything *good* possible at all, or at most some small anything good but only after lots of unimaginablly horrible things I think not only possible but inevitable
I'd never heard of Toyah Wilcox or knew a single personal fact about Robert Fripp's personal life until Hamster sent me the link one or two or three posts ago, Fripp was Kind to me once in a plantation house outside Harpers Ferry when workshopping with crafty guitarists, HE WAS NOT WEARING A SUIT AND TIE
"So why are we convinced, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that sabotage is an unacceptable and ineffective tactic? One answer is that it threatens the very notion of private property—the bedrock of all of our social relationships. To commit an act of sabotage is to announce that you do not recognize the legitimacy of property rights; to expose the relationship between politics, morality, and the economic order; and to abandon the liberal illusion that discourse undermines (property-based) power relations" >>
<< "We’re in this very funny paradoxical moment in history, which is full of moments of dynamic hysteria, yet everything always remains the same. We get this wave of hysteria – angry people click more! – and those clicks feed the systems and nothing changes. It’s a rational machine model."
"To understand is not to condone. But if the ruling elites, and their courtiers masquerading as journalists, continue to gleefully erase these people from the media landscape, to attack them as less than human, or as Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” while at the same time refusing to address the grotesque social inequality that has left them vulnerable and afraid, it will fuel ever greater levels of extremism and ever greater levels of state repression and censorship." >>
<< "The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?"
Double haiku on cracker-whiperer's death - I'm not grave-dancing I don't begrudge grave-dancers. Crackers denouncing grave-dancers can gouge their eyes out with rusty shitsmeared grapefruit spoons
"The U.S. ruling class deploys the military for three main reasons: (1) to forcibly open up countries to foreign investment, (2) to ensure the free flow of natural resources from the global south into the hands of multinational corporations, and (3) because war is profitable. The third of these reasons, the profitability of war, is often lacking detail in analyses of U.S. imperialism: The financial industry, including investment banks and private equity firms, is an insatiable force seeking profit via military activity." >>>
<<< "And so that’s really a trend that we see increasingly is that our response to climate adaptation by the richest countries is really to militarize our response to it. And that’s a real, as that quote you just read, that’s a real concern because it’s a kind of politics of the armed lifeboat. Where basically you rescue a few and then you have a gun trained on the rest."
"The result is a left-wing discourse that is increasingly anti-intellectual. It has to be anti-intellectual, because its members live in mutual fear. The set of views which might be the basis for cancellation are ever-evolving, in part because of the wide discretion this gives wealthy elites in their deployment of cancellation to eliminate voices they don’t like. In such a climate, the voices that can survive are the obsequious types with no real positions of their own. These people can adapt to ever-shifting discursive rules because they are more interested in having a career than in saying anything substantive. People with principled positions–even people who go to great lengths to avoid cancellation–are likely to run afoul of nebulous rules sooner or later. We end up with a “left” discourse populated mainly by people who are comfortable appeasing oligarchs while trafficking in left-wing aesthetics and tropes." >>>
<<<<< It was Krasznahorkai's *Baron Wenckheim'sHomecoming,* a novel I'd waited for with great anticipation, finally got the English translation last January 2020, my eyes do not have the stamina or my concentration the muscle both once did, between the tiny font and the Krasznahorkai triple freight train sentences, first no doubt bell of old
<<< "Every reader is a reader of crime novels. They want the criminal to succeed because they want to escape, and they want the police to catch the criminal because they want to restore order. The reader has the same attitude toward writing in general. She wants it to be free, and then she also wants to say that the third act was all wrong, or that the story didn’t deliver, or that this time around its heart wasn’t in the right place. But whenever a story seems off, that’s when you know that the author was truly free. A story isn’t a fucking chair. This isn’t Bauhaus."
