L, formerly known here as Earthgirl (that's new Shakey), asked me to again go to No Kings with her tomorrow and of course I said yes. Unlike the previous two, the nearest one won't be on the Strathmore Music Hall campus - they refused to allow it - No Kings is from 11am to 1pm - since the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is performing a treacly motherfucking Tchaikovsky (today in redundancy) symphony at 8pm, the fuck? Tchaikovsky? Kill me. Will be at the White Flint metro station - locals know the anger embedded in that naming. The fuck is this dope posting on a Friday afternoon, he asks himself. Hey, remember when Bardo Pond covered Brian Eno? I did this morning out of nowhere
Home from Michigan. In the drive-around sampling, I saw 16 Al-Sayed yard signs, the majority in Washtenaw County, 13 Rogers yards signs, the majority in Jackson and Ingham counties, both as expected. Did not see a single bumper-sticker for any candidate. Voters of both parties, I was told by my son-in-law's father at the family dinner I am required to attend every trip, are united in wanting the election over and all hate their party just less than they hate their shitty candidate's opponent. Nothing has changed. Hey, there was a rare Airborne Event this past Tuesday evening, Dan played this from one of my trinity of musical Richards:
I did see plenty of signage offering, for example, Train Like a Navy Seal businesses. A local, Justin, I disc with when I'm in Michigan who is certainly not maga tells me local militias are recruiting and thriving and preparing for both election day at the polls and for the days after. He told me to listen late at night for a sudden explosion of squeal-outs and speeding as local white male pick-up truck Americans practice deployment and encirclement, and last Saturday around one in the morning yes, with gun shots. I said, too many people think if the midterms are the bloodbath for Trump and magamerica in the voters booth some are predicting then everything will be rebooted and crackers and christers (and Trump, his henchman, his shitlords) will passively accept and respect the results. People, Justin said, better get ready, which put Eva Cassidy's cover of the Curtis Mayfield song in my head where it's been to this moment, L & I were at this show at Blues Alley in Georgetown
The above and below were added before Trump canceled the live stream, he didn't do it for moral but for electoral reasons of course. The cancelation does not lessen the evil motives of those who wanted the killing streamed
I can't take a photo of it this moment because I am in Michigan, but my copy of *Nox* is (a brilliant work of poetry) one of my cherished objects, it's, simply as an object to hold, gorgeous
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Here's another one or my trinity of musical Richards, he's the flutist and singer
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Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin
Anne Carson
Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.
What is strength?
Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.
I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.
Glancing
at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf
she said
I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and
something exposed itself in her voice,
a Babel
thrust between us at that instant which we would never
learn to construe—
taste of iron.
Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t
mean them to.
Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.
God
or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know
how novelist Ōe
describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke
as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio
and cried.
Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.
Astonished
and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.
Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had
become human
on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage
my husband
began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.
If I answered [she]
hung up. My ears grew hoarse.
How are you.
—
No.
—
Maybe. Eight. Can you.
—
The white oh yes.
—
Yes.
What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls
of the flesh
of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull
than the tick of a clock.
A puppy
learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.
Ōe says
many children were told and some believed that when the war was over
9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones. 16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness. 8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off. 1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats. 11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays. 10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye. 9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore. 12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out. 2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows. 4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed. 4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it. 1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night. 16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring. 3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror. 2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger. 14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes. 6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it. 3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan. 11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry. 7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful. 9.3. Their eyes fell out. 11.3. The food was tastier that way. 11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt. 11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm. 4.1. To uncontrive. 6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag, 3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night. 9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did. 2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb. 5.2. Proust liked a good jolt. 7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness. 13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd. 6.3. And after dinner, harps. 1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture. 2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb. 4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all. 14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul. 3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans. 9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts. 5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’. 16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea. 9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep. 5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity. 15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence. 16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes. 8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund. 11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation. 12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs. 10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats. 15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off. 6.2. So began the dinner parties. 10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain. 8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth. 7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs. 5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust. 4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact. 11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands. 16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.
I have always loved being on vacation but always hated going on vacation, the days leading up to it, the getting there. Currently sitting in the waiting area of BWI, I board a flight to Detroit in an hour and a half, I hate this, the waiting, the boarding, the assholes who refuse to put their luggage into baggage arguing with flight attendants who tell them they can't put all their shit in the overheads, the coughers who won't wear masks - why would anyone anytime get on a tube of recycling air without wearing a mask even if these weren't plague times? - the taking off, the flying, the sitting next to a woman with a screaming infant, the landing, the assholes who stand up the minute the plane gets to the gate as if they'll get off the plane sooner for standing, I'm like this right now:
That's half of two/thirds of the latest self-portrait, the torso, see the other half, the head, of the two/thirds here. I can't read in the airport, might as well type and give you the grid that's amassing. Should be in Chelsea by 2:15, should be on the Waterloo-Pinckney Trail with L by 2:30, will be having dinner with our daughter by 6:30, by which time I will love being on vacation. Not only was Glenn Branca born 78 years ago yesterday, his music is perfect for hating to go on vacation
