One Man Loves But Is Not Loved in Return by the Object

• I'm reading Nicholson Baker's *Baseless* on American shitlord evil and how shitlords keep their henchpersons' secrets in general and American development and use of biological weapons secret in particular, here's a list of animals killed in gruesome experiments as America's biological warfare research first ramped-up during World War 2

• Wait til you read what they did to American citizens *after* WW2
• Duh, yes, but useful duh because (a) you should also read Baker's *Human Smoke* for more excellent thinking and writing on our shitlords and how you and I (but, more importantly, more precariously, not me but my daughter and any children she has) are walking sausage, (b) a reminder shitlords were killing citizens long before this plague, (c) we will never know how much we were poisoned in this or any plague and (d) which of us was deliberately poisoned more, (e) and are still deliberately poisoned more, (f) if I can read this non-fiction book and read what was done to animals I think at least three more years added before I even think of reading Moby Dick again, (g) much of southwest America will be uninhabitable in fifty years unless you own a luxury missile silo, (h) consider too our shitlords' equal or greater investment and deployment of psychological warfare because (i) am telling you three times we are *always* being reprogrammed, (j) eff, (k) what would you have them do to my George, not Earthgirl's George, the first Georgetown professor to adopt me, he called me *nephew,* I called him *uncle,* dead twenty years, asked me, told me, the assholiest understand assholism, my George, the hobbesianist beloved of my life, (l) herd immunity, open a new doc, type herd immunity, read it until it's not English, (m) beloved Mr Alarum (congratulations, union), why didn't you tell me you were back on twwwtr? (n) *Human Smoke* on how the FDR/Churchill baited WW2 to end the depression, (o)f course rationale, labor force saved by mushrooms more effective short term than BW, (p) and boom, (q) er me, fat off the generation of cattle fattened by shitlords post WW2 profit, (r) I also recommend Nicholson Baker's novels, especially *The Mezzanine* if you fixate on objects like I do, (s) but remember, our shitlords will kill you for profit even if that profit is only the pennies a day to keep you kenneled, (t) there is never shitlord benevolence, you are nothing but cattle, yo(u), waiting for motherfucking Democrats to save you, motherfucking Democrats are the electric fence around your drought-stricken pasture drying and dying because of our shitlords' fossil fuel profiting, (v) Maryland's Department of Natural Resources regularly twaats out advice on the best places that day to torture and kill animals for giggle, e(x)actly to remind you our shitlords will torture and kill you not only (but primarily) for profit but for giggle, wh(y) my complicity taken for granted by shitlords, (z) fuck me

• When language has no meaning
• America: third world country
• America: third world country
• America: third world country  
• America: third world country
• Disinformed to Death
• I hate motherfucking Democrats
• Democracy for Losers
• Adjuncts in a time of plague
• Maximum power, maximum profit
• Why is American short fiction less adventurous than American poetry?
• The practice of translation
• George
• Acid comeback, someday 
• New Jason Molina posthumous release! get it at Bandcamp

PITY THE BATHTUB ITS FORCED EMBRACE OF THE HUMAN FORM

Matthea Harvey
 

1.   

Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet

Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen

A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through

Where the marble is worn away with industrious

Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say

Because the queen does not want room for splashing

The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king

Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are

Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys

Her mother once told her your ancestry is your only

Support then is what she gets in the bathtub she floats

Never holds her nose and goes under not because

She might sink but because she knows to keep her ears

Above water she smiles at the circle of courtiers below

Her feet are kicking against walls which cannot give

Satisfaction at best is to manage to stay clean

 

2.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the whims of

One man loves but is not loved in return by the object

Of his affection there is little to tell of his profession

There is more for it is because he works with glass

That he thinks things are clear (he loves) and adjustable

(she does not love) he knows how to take something

Small and hard and hot and make room for

His breath quickens at night as he dreams of her he wants

To create a present unlike any other and because he cannot

Hold her he designs something that can a bathtub of

Glass shimmers red when it is hot he pours it into the mold

In a rush of passion only as it begins to cool does it reflect

His foolishness enrages him he throws off his clothes meaning

To jump in and lie there but it is still too hot and his feet propel

Him forward he runs from one end to the other then falls

To the floor blisters begin to swell on his soft feet he watches

His pain harden into a pretty pattern on the bottom of the bath

 

3.

Pity the bathtub its forced embrace of the human

Form may define external appearance but there is room

For improvement within try a soap dish that allows for

Slippage is inevitable as is difference in the size of

The subject may hoard his or her bubbles at different

Ends of the bathtub may grasp the sponge tightly or

Loosely it may be assumed that eventually everyone gets in

The bath has a place in our lives and our place is

Within it we have control of how much hot how much cold

What to pour in how long we want to stay when to

Return is inevitable because we need something

To define ourselves against even if we know that

Whenever we want we can pull the plug and get out

Which is not the case with our own tighter confinement

Inside the body oh pity the bathtub but pity us too

I Always Lie When I Always Say I Didn't Know the Gun Was Loaded

• The more kayfabe breaks the less bark needed
• Friend advises me waste no gaargh on August
• She doesn't work in education and have a wife and daughter vectoring too
• Sorry for hectoring you before now future
• Understanding shitlord responsibility
• Our childlike, emotional leaders
• The Glitterpill Chronicle 
• In Hollywood
• rEmEmBeR: motherfucking Democrats
• Lots of good and important links
• There's a new Furs album? Yes!
• Reminder: seventy five years ago today the United States committed the worse war crime in human history, exceptionalism
• Actuating, beckoning, cackling, dismissing
• eliminating, festering, guttering
• hyperventilating, irritating, jeffing
• katebushing, lecturing, manipulating 
• neurotic, opinionated, pestering 
• Quark-admiring, reckoning, sectioning 
• tractioning, (e)ulogizing, vacationing
• wavering, Xaviering 
• yammering, shaZaming, I apologize

ANGER

April Bernard

I

 

When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelled

of old rinds and wet cigarette butts

I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulder

and aimed but did not fire it at the man

who had just taken my virginity like a snack,

with my collusion, but still — 

 

When I sat in a conference room

in an inquisition

at the “newspaper of record,”

across from the one slurping his pipe,

the one arching her eyebrow,

and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest,

repaid insult for insult and left their fancy job

like a squashed bug on the floor — 

  

When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father

spanked me, pants down,

because I had “distressed” my mother

and my vision went red-black and

I did not forgive — 

  

When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast,

the intruder returned in the night

and I did not call the cops again but stood

with a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!”

although this time it was just the wind flapping

and banging the screen door — 

  

When across a skating-rink-sized glistening table

I told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marx

and lost the fellowship — 

  

When I threw a pot of hot coffee

and it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stains

were still there four years later long after he’d left me

when I finally moved out of that East Village hole — 

 

II

I would have had to be thinking

in order to have thought — loaded, not loaded?

 — and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hot

and oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling,

crackle over the furnace of my rage,

to see his face go pale, his eyes widen,

his “put it down, put it down” — and I

put it down and allowed my life as well as his

to go on.

III

I miss my anger. Decades go by

when all I can muster is absent-minded invective,

you know, directed at the news;

or a brief fantasy

of shoving someone in front of a bus. Yesterday

I slammed my fist on my desk

and then apologized, to the desk.

  

Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis:

Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed,

picked out in blue and silver thread bunched

against the crimson,

rough against the fingertips, she

rides a black boar dappled with blood

and waves her double-headed axe — 

 

Yes, I remember her.

I always lie when I always say

I didn’t know the gun was loaded.

Meanwhile the Raccoon Squats on the Gherkins

• Copy/pasting the big birthdays (serendipity generous, Ashbery Bush Garcia Gass Melville in five days) with 2020 updates
• My complicity: the world is shittier 2020 than 2019 but
• my August 1 2020 v August 1 2019 wins
• 2019 birthday run filler, 2020 made me happy

        
                            

• Deleted much but need to note Bill Clinton defined good nigger versus bad nigger at John Lewis' funeral then admitted (and applauded) Obama shivved Bernie, our shitlords and moth
• erfucking Democrats: more ghoul than whore
• more whore than cancer more cancer than ghoul
• This week's band from my CD crates is

               

• Cops are rapists
• Disinformed to Death
• Our shitlords: You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them. This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on America’s elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.
• Tina is a monster: on the above
• Call it genocide
• Ditto
• Liberal elites will create another Trump
            

  
                 

• Reminder: propaganda
• The rot of the St Louis elite
• The fiction of winners & losers
• One more Gass birthday link
• Late Klee
• One more Melville birthday link
• Nick Baker interview 
• White Griot
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Krzhizhanovsky 

ALL SOULS

Michael Collier

A few of us—Hillary Clinton, Vlad Dracula,   

Oprah Winfrey, and Trotsky—peer through   

the kitchen window at a raccoon perched   

outside on a picnic table where it picks

   

over chips, veggies, olives, and a chunk of pâte.   

Behind us others crowd the hallway, many more

dance in the living room. Trotsky fusses with the bloody   

screwdriver puttied to her forehead.

  

Hillary Clinton, whose voice is the rumble

of a bowling ball, whose hands are hairy

to the third knuckle, lifts his rubber chin to announce,   

“What a perfect mask it has!” While the Count

   

whistling through his plastic fangs says, “Oh,   

and a nose like a chef.” Then one by one   

the other masks join in: “Tail of a gambler,”   

“a swashbuckler’s hips,” “feet of a cat burglar.”

  

Trotsky scratches herself beneath her skirt

and Hillary, whose lederhosen are so tight they form a codpiece,   

wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog.   

Dracula and Oprah, the married hosts, hold hands

  

and then let go. Meanwhile the raccoon squats on   

the gherkins, extracts pimentos from olives, and sniffs   

abandoned cups of beer. A ghoul in the living room   

turns the music up and the house becomes a drum.

   

The windows buzz. “Who do you love? Who do you love?”   

the singer sings. Our feathered arms, our stockinged legs.   

The intricate paws, the filleting tongue.

We love what we are; we love what we’ve become.

let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness

Born 201 years ago today.

From Moby Dick:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

(Added 2015: read that outloud. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.)

Via Brad:

"Poor Hoffman — I remember the shock I had when I first saw the mention of his madness. — But he was just the man to go mad — imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried, — without a port of haven in the universe to make. . . . This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him, — which but few men do.  For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire.  And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains." (Correspondence)

"[I]t is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.  Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but . . . [n]o common-place is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one's self of it into a book; for once trapped in a book, then the book can be put into the fire, and all will be well." (Pierre)

"I forgot to mention, that last night about 9 1/2 P.M. Adler & Taylor came into my room, & it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we did have, accordingly.  Adler drank about three table spoons full — Taylor 4 or five tumblers &c.  We had an extraordinary time & did not break up till after two in the morning.  We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c. were discussed under the influence of the whiskey." (Correspondence)

"We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street." (Correspondence)

""Dolt & ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William [Shakespeare]." (Correspondence)

From: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

"I am pleased to believe that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill, and therefore am so eccentric as to have confidence in the latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the rattle-snake, whose lithe neck and burnished maze of tawny gold, as he sleekly curls aloft in the sun, who on the prairie can behold without wonder?" As he breathed these words, he seemed so to enter into their spirit — as some earnest descriptive speakers will — as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described. Meantime, the stranger regarded him with little surprise, apparently, though with much contemplativeness of a mystical sort, and presently said: "When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature?

Via Ed (lots of Melville there):

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

(from Moby Dick).

Via Flowerville, from Pierre, or The Ambiguities.

From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has on power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; -- nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

ibid:

But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event—the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that we alone hold the only and chosen key? 

                         
From Moby Dick:

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tassled, the sharks, also, with the jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside-down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet there is no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whale-ship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

From Moby Dick (and for Savid Dampselle and that other guy who was in Dampselle's Gaithersburg High School English class up on D-Wing above the Auto-Shop classroom/garage):

“Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”   

Oh, you read Melville's traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post this far? Thank you!

2019: I wrote earlier this year I can't imagine reading Moby Dick again because of whaling, I can imagine reading again, maybe, but not soon.

2019: Someone else with my qualms and reason to read it again soon 

2019:

• The problems of Bartleby
• Twelve billion tons of ice melted in Greenland yesterday
• Reading, and mourning, *Moby Dick* on the cusp of climate catastrophe: Melville’s 200th birthday coincides with the human-made sixth extinction, as well as with the emptying, warming, and clogging up of the world’s oceans via overfishing and the dumping of plastics. Such facts imbue his novel with renewed and melancholy relevance. Reading his book about a sentient, majestic, and desperate-to-live marine mammal in a period when the planet’s whales — and all other creatures — are under such threat grants the work a grim ecological cast.
• And then there is Chapter 77, *The Great Heidelburgh Tun,* on decapitating the slaughtered whale to extract profit, what my copy opened to when I picked it up just now, and...

2020: Read Benito Cereno in March, and, re: Moby Dick, I am in negotiations with myself whether if I skip the slaughters is it reading the novel

Have I ever mentioned that I love Melville? Oh, the condensed Moby Dick? Was six years ago's Giftmas present from Planet. Have you ever gathered I love my daughter?

What I Had Discovered Is That Every Space Contains More Space Than the Space It Contains

William Gass born ninety-six years ago yesterday  This is the traditional William Gass birthday post excerpt: from The Tunnel:

The other large carton unpacked in the same way - box into box - but the feeling it gave me was the opposite of that suggested by the endless nest of Russians dollies it otherwise resembled, for what I was opening was a den of spaces which now covered the floor near my feet. It was plain that every ten-by-ten-by eight container contained cubes which were nine by nine by seven, and eight by eight by six, and seven by seven by five, and so on down to three by three by two, as well as many smaller, thinly sided one at every interval in between, so that out of one box a million more might multiply, confirming Zeno's view, although at that age, with an unfurnished mind, I couldn't have known of his paradoxes let alone have been able to describe one with any succinctness. What I had discovered is that every space contains more space than the space it contains.

That passage reminds me what I'm trying to get at here (2020: everywhere) though of course Gass does it better (2020: considering a WIHDITESCMSTTSIC tattoo first before the IHTWTGADTLWLIPTD tattoo)

More Gass here from here

• William Gass reading from The Tunnel.
• William Gass' The Art of Self.
• You have to be grimly determined.
• Gass eviscerates Updike.
• The Radical Criticism of William Gass.
• Till the Knowing Ends.
• William Gass, painted by Philip Guston.

• Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston.
• On On Being Blue.
• 1977 Gass interview. 
• 2005 Gass interview.
• 2013 Gass interview.
• William Gass on postmodernism (h/t Ed for the youtube at top too).
• On Middle C.
• If you know of more links to add, and give the fuck, please send them.
• From Omensetter's Luck: When Harry Pimber walks into the woods and names the trees (via):

From The Tunnel, read out loud if you can, if you want:

Also too:

Excerpt from The Tunnel
William Gass

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

O! Jerry born seventy-eight years ago tomorrow, gonna bump his traditional BLCKDGRD Holy Day to today because (a) there's yet another BLCKDGRD Holy Day tomorrow and (b) because you'll see, or not.

Jerry Garcia was born 78 years ago tomorrow. Something else I say once a year: that 4/12/78 Durham show ▲? , one of the five best nights of my life, the buzz, the girl and that week, the intimacy of the venue, the Dead on (despite the shitty recording - trust me). Saw dozens of dozens of shows, others who have can vouch too, there were stinkers, there were the many meh minus to meh plus shows (though, with few exceptions, BLAST was had), then there were the shows when the band clicked, as infrequent as a come-from-behind walk-off home run home game, and made all the mehs and stinkers worth it.

Click THIS for LOTS more songs. Was at this show too:

Looking for a Moment That Will Never Happen

Sixty-two today.

2020 UPDATE! Love and Anger gone, everything property. I like this song too

This is still true, and Side Two's lead is increasing: 

Hounds of Love has to be one of my three most listened to albums, and the song cycle of side two (back in the days of album sides, youngsters) unquestionably the one side of music I've listened to more than any other:

• Dream of Sheep and 
• Under Ice and  
• Waking the Witch and  
• Watching You Without Me and  
• Jig of Life and  
• Hello Earth and finishing with, and 

you must listen in order like I just did for full kaboom, holyfuck, I love this song:

Permanent seat in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. CLICK for LOTS more songs (my apologies if some of the youtubes have died).




   
*

 

More below the fold.