Coughin' Smoke Whooping Hope

Beefheart - Don Van Vliet - born 78 years ago today. I like his music, people can vouch. More HERE.

My Obsessed Incessant Itch and Interest in Things Found Frightful

• Morton Feldman, born 93 years ago yesterday, innermost circle of rotational MSADI5G.
• I didn't forget - I knew, know, will remember he has the same birthday as Earthgirl.
• In middle of a satisfying (as opposed to standard) seethe yesterday, I indulged the seethe.
• Life in the Seethocene.
• I didn't want to post Feldman in a satisfying seethe, diminishes both the seethe and the Feldman.
• Put another way, Feldman too important to my ears to use as zoloft on my seethe.
• Here's Feldman's Ubuweb page (you do throw your pocket's coins at Ubuweb, yes? No.).

• I. Hate. Motherfucking. Snow. Not as much as I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats. Not even close, and I. Hate. Motherfucking. Snow. LOTS! People can vouch.
• The seething never stops in The Seethocene.
• Disappointments of The Apocalypse.
• Professional liberal concerned Jeff Bezos wife gets half.
• I don't watch TV because I don't watch TV, I don't need TV to spy on me, I can spy on me for Power enough online and on my phone and email etc.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Rest in Peace, Joseph Jarman.

NIGHTWATCHMAN'S SONG

W.D. SNODGRASS

I

 

What’s unseen may not exist—   

Or so those secret powers insist   

            That prowl past nightfall,   

Enabled by the brain’s blacklist   

            To fester out of sight,   

 

So we streak from bad to worse,   

Through an expanding universe   

            And see no evil.   

On my rounds like a night nurse   

            Or sentry on qui vive,   

 

I make, through murkier hours, my way   

Where the sun patrolled all day   

            Toward stone-blind midnight   

To poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray   

            At what’s hushed up and hidden.   

Lacking all leave or protocol,   

Things, one by one, hear my footfall,   

            Blank out their faces,   

Dodge between trees, find cracks in walls   

            Or lock down offices.   

  

Still, though scuttling forces flee   

Just as far stars recede from me   

            To outmost boundaries,   

I stalk through ruins and debris,   

            Graveyard and underground.   

  

Led by their helmetlantern’s light   

Miners inch through anthracite;   

            I’m the unblinking mole   

That sniffs out what gets lost or might   

            Slip down the world’s black hole.   

 

II

  

(ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns)

 

What’s obscene?—just our obsessed,   

Incessant itch and interest   

      In things found frightful:   

In bestial tortures, rape, incest;   

      In ripe forbidden fruit   

  

Dangling, lush, just out of reach;   

Dim cellars nailed up under each   

      Towering success,   

The loser’s envy that will teach   

      A fierce vindictiveness,   

  

The victors’ high court that insures   

Pardon for winners and procures   

      Little that’s needed   

But all we lust for. What endures?—   

      Exponential greed   

  

And trash containers overflowing   

With shredded memos, records showing   

      What, who, when, why   

’Til there’s no sure way of knowing   

      What’s clear to every eye:   

  

The heart’s delight in hatred, runny   

As the gold drip from combs of honey;   

      The rectal intercourse   

Of power politics and money   

      That slimes both goal and source.   

  

What’s obscured?—what’s abscessed.   

After inspection, I’d suggest   

      It’s time we got our head   

Rewired. I plan to just get pissed,   

      Shitfaced and brain-dead.

I Hear a Dog Who Is Always in My Death

• The only things that distract me from the daily dogtrack suck worse than the daily dogtrack
• more every day, the suck worses, can't write about here
• Sociopaths, said a friend yesterday about Republicans, sociopaths, I said, abound
• and So got yelled at yet again for insisting that between the sociopaths who pretend not to be sociopaths and the sociopaths who delight in open sociopathy the former are sociopathier than the latter
• Zones of Exception: In Agamben’s framework, the US–Mexico border can be understood as a vast zone of exception, a place where laws and rights are applied differently than they are in any other part of the nation. Since September 11, presidents of both parties have deployed military troops there in response to ill-defined crises. President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in April, for example, came at a time when border crossings were at historic lows, and his October deployment of active-duty troops was election-season theater designed to stoke the frenzied media coverage surrounding a single caravan of refugees. All the while the US border has remained, by almost any measure, more secure than at any point in recent decades—though we might ask, secure for whom? (emphasis mine)
• Motherfucking Democrats are sociopaths. 
• I am telling you three times, the sociopaths who pretend not to be sociopaths and pretend to protect us from sociopaths who vanguard open sociopathy are Enemy One, I said
• my friend said, the fuck?
• Tweeted link to post, BLAMMO, seven unfollows in ten minutes, I am telling you three times...
• Why They Can't Write.
• Radical Realism: Sam Pink? Anyone?
• Beloved The Aardvark.
• This is Clyde.
• Hey, it's Earthgirl's birthday, send her an email card if you know her
• When Big Blood cover The Cure

I HEAR A DOG WHO IS ALWAYS IN MY DEATH

SAMUEL ACE

How is it you bring me back to the cliffs   the bright heads of eagles   the vessels of grief in the soil?   I dig for you with a gentle bit of lighter fluid and three miniature rakes   burning only a single speck of dirt to touch a twig as tiny as a neuron   or even smaller   one magic synapse inside the terminus limbs of your breath

                 

The fighter jets fly over the house every hour   no sound but inside our hands   I hear a far chime and I am cold a north wind and the grit of night   first the murmur then the corpse   first the paddling then the banquet   first the muzzle then the hanging   the plea   first the break then the tap the tap   I hear your skin   the reach of your arms   the slick along your thighs   more floorboard than step   first the flannel then the gag   first the bells   then the exhale

I hear a dog who is always in my death   the breath of a mother who holds a gun   a pillow in the shape of a heart   first the planes then the criminal ponds   first the ghost boats then the trains   first the gates then the bargain   a child formed from my fingertip and the eye of my grandmother’s mother   a child born at 90   the rise and rush of air   a child who walks from the gas

Her Only Beauty to Be All Moose

• DC United upyuppied yesterday.
• I quit these motherfuckers long ago in a concrete stadium far away from now and when we never thought they'd get a new stadium
• though we knew they wanted to be these motherfuckers.
• 20 years to biblical apocalypse.
• This thread.
• Making money by fining the poor.
• There is no better metaphor for motherfucking America than motherfucking helmetball.
• Jim's backyard.
• Two days ago was Robert Duncan's centenary, once upon he (and the other forgotten Robert, Bly) were giants.
• Fleabus, though not yet feeble, now unmistakably geriatric.
• There's a kabong new Guided by Voices song! 

POETRY, A NATURAL THING

Robert Duncan
 

Neither our vices nor our virtues   

further the poem. “They came up   

      and died

just like they do every year

      on the rocks.”

      The poem

feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,

      to breed    itself,

a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

    

This beauty is an inner persistence

      toward the source

striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   

      a call we heard and answer

in the lateness of the world

      primordial bellowings

from which the youngest world might spring,

    

salmon not in the well where the   

      hazelnut falls

but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   

      blindly making it.

    

This is one picture apt for the mind.

    

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,

where last year’s extravagant antlers   

      lie on the ground.

The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   

      new antler-buds,

      the same,

    

“a little heavy, a little contrived”,

   

his only beauty to be   

      all moose.

far far, far far far, far far far away Its a far far, far far far, fa da, da da da

  
  
Born 72 years ago today, this is my favorite Bowie song and my favorite Bowie album, you can vouch.
   
Here's LOTS (or what remains of LOTS, lots of youtubes dead.
   
Heathens is underrated, lots.
   
   

Did You Know Jellyfish Have Bigger Brains Than Humans?

The gym I use mounted two giant TVs on the wall, one near the tread mills and full body ellipticals, the other behind the nautilus machines but facing the stationary bikes. The stationary bikes used always by the same dozen old people (including Coughing Woman, who is her own post I hope I never write) who make sure everyone knows the gym is theirs, theirs dammit, and the TV they watch is tuned to Fox. The TV near the treadmills is always tuned to MSNBC. I assume this is by gym policy (and the Fox tuned to that TV by request since it is their gym), though don't know. Both TVs are silent with closed captioning. Yesterday, Saturday Jan 5th, at 3PM, on both Fox and MSNBC, guests horrified at the incivility of Tlaib saying motherfucker, MSNBC the most distraught, THIS GUARANTEES TRUMP'S REELECTION screamed the captioning, MSNBC doing all in it's power to make it so, Number One.

Last night we dinnered with my brother-in-law, his second wife, his son, my non-blood (and only) nephew. My brother-in-law's second wife (who is very nice and I like very much) is a (minor) motherfucking professional Democrat. To her credit, she didn't mind Tlaib's motherfucker though she bemoaned BernieBros bashing of Beto (I didn't pursue why Beto sucks). What do you think is going to happen long term, she said to me, and I said, continuing extraction of remaining rents from the peasants then catastrophic climate change and resource wars and the death of billions of humans if not the destruction of life on the planet. Yeah, she said, but at least the election of someone like Biden will slow it down.

I'm not going distraught on you when I tell you I said to my sister-in-law If you are waiting for Democrats to save you you're a fool, they're in on the job and left it there. She agreed, actually, but seeing no alternative other than giving up she chooses to fight for the lesser evil. She is the majority position, I the minority position. She sees Tlaib and especially AOC as the wave of the future regardless how viciously both are crushed by the GOP and the media, and I didn't say (the check came, it was nine, late, time to go, I can only ask you trust me when I say I wasn't going to say) it's not the GOP and the media that will crush the Tlaibs and AOCs of the Democratic Party.




 

• Didn't say, Trump's value for the elite is he makes people think what he - what any POTUS does - matters.
• I did mention that if HRC doesn't run she will choose the nominee, and this morning, shazam.
• Read this, please: I don’t believe that a well-phrased critique will break the world-sustaining processes that protect the privileged, although that brokenness won’t happen without critique. To break the back of the reproduction of the violence we repudiate (inequality, unfairness, racist/sexist/class biopolitics, for example) we have to disturb the intelligibility of the world, the terms of fairness, responsibility, and of consent, which actually is more likely in the short term to increase the experience of vulnerability rather than protect us from further proximity to it. That’s another way to describe the machinery that animates the intensified frictions of the crisis of the historical present.
• How neoliberalism swallowed the world.
• How to write about the Right - Lilla's response (I paraphrase - you need take more time to understand the racist motherfucker's pov) is illustrative of the motherfucking problem.
• I'd be lying if I didn't admit I enjoy watching the Tlaibs and AOCs make rank and file crackers nuts.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Glad to be unhappy.
• 2019 Predictions.
• On living in Atlanta (since at least two of you regulars like in or near Atlanta).
• What's the point of writing?
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The last of the four new late James Tate poems in January 2019 Poetry below.

THE THIEF

JAMES TATE

          My wife and I were spending a quiet night at home. She was reading

a magazine on the couch and I was reading my novel in my chair. I said,

“Darling, can I fix you a cup of hot chocolate?” She said, “That would

be great.” So I got up and went into the kitchen and started to boil the

milk. A few minutes later I handed her the cup. “Hmmm, smells great.

Thank you, darling,” she said. I sat down and resumed my reading. She

said, “Did you know a tiger has the same number of bones in it as a monkey?”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “And a whale has the same number as a mouse.”

“Get out of here,” I said. “These are some little known facts discovered

by a man named John D. Baxter,” she said. “He must be crazy,” I said.

Then we were quiet for a while. I looked over and she was asleep. I went

on reading my novel. Then I put my novel down and got up and started to

tiptoe around the house. I went into our bedroom and over to the dresser.

I opened up Mitzy’s jewelry box and let the jewels run through my fingers.

There were some fantastic pieces in there, diamonds, rubies, emeralds. I

thought about stealing some, but felt creepy about it. I put them back in

the box and tiptoed back into the living room. I tripped on the coffee table

and went crashing down. Mitzy woke with a start. “Go back to sleep,”

I said. “What was that?” she said. “I tripped, that’s all,” I said.

She started to get up. “Where are you going?” I said. “I want to look in

my jewelry box,” she said. “Why?” I said. “I dreamed somebody was trying

to steal something in there,” she said. She went into the bedroom and

looked in the box, then came out. “It’s okay,” she said. “Well, I’m glad,”

I said. She got back on the couch and picked up her magazine. “Did you

know jellyfish have bigger brains than humans?” she said. “I don’t believe

it,” I said. “Well, they do. It says right here,” she said.