Curled in Sleep as the Procession Passes

• Rosie Stanley Olive yesterday, living room windows
• see the avatar there that can't be avatar here because blog centuries of tradition, another word for branding, the fuck am I conditioned
• On Democratic poobahs' sleeping patterns
• Starvation sanctions
• One positive side-effect of Trump breaking kayfabe?
• I had to brake once on Mass at Yuma in Spring Valley to save Tucker Carlson's ass, you're welcome
• The good news of collapse?
• America's new concentration camp system
• Abraham Lincoln's concentration camp and the genocide of indigenous natives 
• Sacred cows and the logic of protest
• I am telling you three times, white Americans will kill us all
• Policing the borders of suffering
• The limit does not exist
  
• Imagine thinking Iran's elite give a fuck about hungry citizens any more than America's elite give a fuck about hungry Americans
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Writing Beckett's letters
• and it seems I can't rebrand myself at twaater neither
• Other than the more than suckful NIN this is a good list of Industrial

TWELVE THIRTY ONE NINETEEN NINETY NINE

Larry Levis

First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums,

Patron Saint of rust,

You have become too famous to be read.

I let the book fall behind me until it becomes

A book again. Cloth, thread, & the infinite wood.

Don’t worry. Don’t worry.

In the future, everyone, simply everyone,

Will be hung in effigy.

The crepe paper in the high school gym will be

Black & pink & feathery,

Rainbow trout & a dog’s tongue. In effigy. This,

For example, was written in memory of ...

But of whom? Brecht gasping for air in the street?

Truman dancing alone with his daughter?

Goodbye, little century.

Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots

From one side of  the street to the other,

Trying to find its way

Out of  the parade.

Forgive me for saluting you

With a hand still cold, sweating,

And resembling, as I hold it up & a heavy sleep

Fills it, the body of someone

Curled in sleep as the procession passes.

Excuse me, but at the end of our complete belief,

Which is what you required of us, don’t we deserve

A good belly laugh? Don’t we deserve

A shout in the street?

And this confetti on which our history is being written,

Smaller & smaller, less clear every moment,

And subject to endless revision?

Under the circumstances, & because

It can imagine no other life, doesn’t the hand,

Held up there for hours,

Deserve it?

No? No hunh? No.

Kitties Came and Went All Night Long

• Don't remember what I imagined 2019 to be in any nine of my six decades this August
• This post is re: you couldn't pay me to watch a full episode of Get Smart
• I can't imagine 2029

• Bernie Kopell ▲ , creator of Siegfried, my digital avatar forever and from Day One, born 87 years ago today, born within a month of my dad.
• Standard disclaimer for standard Bernie Kopell birthday post: 1965, I'm six, TV toggled from B/W to color: the good created, the damage done.
• An outline of 21st C American History
• Motherfucking neerapodesta on motherfucking Democrats: ...a growing schism in the party between its two poles of influence in the age of social media: the younger, urban, and more left-leaning people who carry out a daily and often pestiferous political dialogue on Twitter, and the older and more traditionally liberal-to-moderate people who make up the actual backbone of the party across America. If there is a division within the party that will bring it to ruin in 2020, this is it.
• Actual backbone
• We're fucked, now what?
• Trump is to the Republican soul as Biden is to the Democratic, I said yesterday to a Bidenite colleague, too easy....
• The art of problematic actors
• I can't imagine watching anything on TV now
• Do drones dream of electric wars?
• I actually like my avatar - is me, not an actor from a 1960's laugh-tracked comedy - at the other place but must negotiate with myself to no avail to make me me here, fine metaphors abound

ANOTHER OBSCURE REVERIE

Tom Clark

Kitties came and went all night long
                                              2:30 - 5:30 A.M.

as in a curious furry nightmare
moth fluttering around the room in the dark
way too late
                    for the radiant world...               or is it?

That's the sphere of the lux and
                                            the lumen, spurned

at your own risk -
the dark and the strange, or luminous
                                          and unlucky

Do You Have Adequate Oxen For the Job?

• Shittier noises augur clusterfuck upticking
• not me as much as once, my hate stale
• apostasies motherfucking burps now
• though I did think I'd enjoy this more
• The two party system on "concentration camps":
• Crackerstanis: it's a Holiday Inn Express and more than drug gang members deserve you anti-Semitic commie-jew bitch
• Neerapodestas: of course they're "concentration camps," attention slut bitch, why didn't you say "internment facility" like the boss' email ordered
• Death of a Political Junkie: I'm not the only one who thought there would be more chuckles
• I got Milkman, I'm 30 pages in and more than hopeful but I'm always more than hopeful in any novel up to page 31
• SeatSix (Happy Birthday yesterday) send him happies, Beloveds
• What now is
• Let me loan you after SeatSix (Happy Birthday yesterday) reads it Black Leopard Red Wolf (or just give you, if I do reread it I'll read the paperback, backpackwise), it does the you? me? us? clusterfuck better than anyone I've yet read
• GOOD NEWS!
• I am telling you three times we are being adequately-enough tuned
• Nick Drake born 71 years ago yesterday

                   
THE WORKFORCE

James Tate

Do you have adequate oxen for the job?

No, my oxen are inadequate.

Well, how many oxen would it take to do an adequate job?

I would need ten more oxen to do the job adequately.

I'll see if I can get them for you.

I'd be obliged if you could do that for me.

Certainly. And do you have sufficient fishcakes for the men?

We have fifty fishcakes, which is less than sufficient.

I'll have them delivered on the morrow.

Do you need maps of the mountains and the underworld?

We have maps of the mountains but we lack maps of the underworld.

Of course you lack maps of the underworld,

there are no maps of the underworld.

And, besides, you don't want to go there, it's stuffy.

I had no intention of going there, or anywhere for that matter.

It's just that you asked me if I needed maps. . . .

Yes, yes, it's my fault, I got carried away.

What do you need, then, you tell me?

We need seeds, we need plows, we need scythes, chickens,

pigs, cows, buckets and women.

Women?

We have no women.

You're a sorry lot, then.

We are a sorry lot, sir.

Well, I can't get you women.

I assumed as much, sir.

What are you going to do without women, then?

We will suffer, sir. And then we'll die out one by one.

Can any of you sing?

Yes, sir, we have many fine singers among us.

Order them to begin singing immediately.

Either women will find you this way or you will die

comforted. Meanwhile busy yourselves

with the meaningful tasks you have set for yourselves.

Sir, we will not rest until the babes arrive.

it's not too late for you if it's not too late for me

• Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica released 50 years ago yesterday 
• anthem! fellow clusterfuckers

• One of a dozen of most listened to albums and certainly the album my tripping friends demanded I turn it the fuck off most
• In those days, youngsters, to listen on headphones meant silencing the needle on the turntable for everyone but you, used only when others had crashed
• Judging from reaction to the Trout Mask Replica songs I tweeted last night all of you either are someone I tripped with and told me to turn it the fuck off or someone if we *had* (and still can) tripped together and I'd put Trout Mask Replica on you'd have demanded I turn it the fuck off
• Three out of four people tripping with me would demand I turn Kate Bush the fuck off when I'd play an album and of the one-fourth who liked Kate while tripping seven-eighths were women
• Not surprisingly, most of the tripping friends who'd refuse Beefheart insisted on Zappa
• what a fuckstupid species, us, but it's not too late for you if it's not too late for me (you'll have to listen to the song above to hear that lyric and understand its (clusterfuckful significance) true context within the song
• I love Beefheart, people can vouch, lots HERE

As Good as Rocks

Done with Marlon James' Black Leopard Red Wolf, the first novel by an author I had never read I've read in probably two years. Sadogo is dead, the Minji are dead (but for Smoke Girl, maybe), Leopard is dead but can dig for resurrection (maybe, and *this* maybe may be bridge to second book of planned trilogy). I bet a pint the Aesi gets one of the two. But that is not the story. 

I don't do reviews (Ed does) beyond this, my format for positive reviews: if I like you and you ask nice I'll get you a copy.

First time I enjoyed reading a novel since the last until the next, first time I've wanted to read a next novel (as opposed to feeling obligated to always be in a novel) in forever....

I can't imagine rereading any novel and hereby suspend my (not religiously honored) rotation of rereads, so that copy of Vollmann's Fathers and Crows over on the piano bench which I picked up and read two pages last night, no. I won't do Whale Slaughtering again (ever, if I had to guess now no matter no one used the English language better anywhere, I can't do the whale slaughtering again). I'm giving Pynchon and Barth and Elkin and Melville and Ishiguro and Harington and Gass and Eliot and Vollmann and Dostoyevsky and Grossman and Murnane and Krasnahorkei and anyone else whose novels I've read at least a year off, ibid. 

Recommend something, anything, or not. I'm not taking Olive off:

• The self-destructive trajectory of overly successful empires
• Climate change: slow, slow, slow, BOOM!
• Definition of *liberals*
• Fuck the Popo Sports Satrydee.
• I am constantly asked when I am introduced or need give my name at a service desk if I am related to Grgg. No. It's a common Serb surname.
• Millions of us
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links
• Cabin
• Oh, I did not read Black Leopard, Red Wolf as a fantasy novel though if it is a fantasy novel it's the first I've ever finished (in the same sense I don't think of Star Trek as science fiction though if it is science fiction it's the only science fiction I've ever watched)
• Something? Anything?

AS GOOD AS ANYTHING

Alice Notley

I don't see the point of

remembering you; you're too boring,

Iowa City, Iowa,

much duller topologically than

Needles, California. I'm here

in the Rebel Motel, with

my grape-colored sweater

and maté tea, whose smoky odor's

bound up with first rooms and foods here

sex and snow. I

write about Needles

Herman and rocks, the story's called

“As Good as Anything,” and in it

daft Herman—true local

of Needles—says

“Rocks is as good as anything.”

I figured that out summer after

first love affair in New York:

hung out, home, at a rock shop

inspecting geodes and thunder eggs

Arsenic samples and petrified

dinosaur dung.

What can I say about Iowa City

everyone's an academic poetry

groupie, I haven't yet written a poem,

there's a bar where for 25 cents a

meal of boiled egg and tiny beer.

Really I don't know what kind of poetry—

what's the name of the make they

use here—or what kinds of

poetry live people write in the world.

Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might

still ask as I patronize,

retrospectively, the Iowa style,

characterized, as I remember,

by the assumption of desperation

boredom behind two-story houses

divorce, incomes, fields, pigs,

getting into pants, well not really

in poems, well no “well”s and all

in the costive mode

of men who—and the suicidal women—

want to be culpable for something,

settle for being mean to their wives

and writing dour stanzas. God this is bitchy

I modeled for art classes

that's rather interesting

the hypocrisy: nobody needs

to paint nude women

they just like to. So here I am

naked for art, which is a lot of

dumb fucks I already know,

same with poetry.

Written and judged by. Those befoibled guys

who think—you know—

the poetic moment's a pocket in

pool; where can I publish it; what can

I do to my second or third wife now.

Nothing happens in Iowa, so

can I myself change here? Yes

I can start to become contemptuous

is that good or bad, probably bad.

In New York I'd developed a philosophy

of sympathy and spiritual equality:

out the window, easily, upon

my first meeting real assholes.

“A rock's as good as anything” 

there are no rocks in Iowa

shit-black soil, a tree or two,

no mountain or tall edifice,

University drabs, peeping Toms, anti-war

riots, visiting poets

treated like royalty, especially if

they fuck the locals or have a record 

of fighting colorfully with their wives.

You can go to the movies once a week,

like in Needles. You can fuck

a visiting poet;  you can be paraded before

a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck.

You can write your first poems

thinking you might as well

since the most stupid people in the universe

are writing their five hundredth here.

I'm doing that now. What

difference does it make.

I like my poems. They're

as good as rocks.

Egoslavian Theme Song Two

The day after the night before yesterday I read a sentence on Pere Ubu's organ on not *only* a new album but possibly the last album and posted about it yesterday before I looked up today's birthday last night and David Thomas is 66 today

I surprise myself, I'm finishing a novel by an author I'd never read, I'm (still) eighty pages from done and I bet everyone but one I care about dies a horrible death (there are no other Kind), and I know why the author must, that his skill doing so will slay me, I need vacation elsewhere than my sillyass deserted islands now, it'd been two summers ago Maine I think I read a fresh novel cold front to back

Ears too

But all David Thomas projects, Pere Ubu most of course but all, one of two permanent seats on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Shitload here.