Mad-Eyed from Stating the Obvious

I find myself increasingly incapable of not condensing and abbreviating. I'm not complaining - I'm reading and writing as well as I have in months. This isn't a coincidence, of course, but I know that the better I'm reading and writing the more obscure I become to everyone else; one side-effect of reading and writing well is an increase in what-the-fuckness. Luckily, many are saying what needs to be thought about, which is the selfish reason (besides blegwhoring, wink) I post so many links, to spare me from saying what needs to be said that I don't feel like saying too.

Another side-effect of reading and writing better is an increase in bleggalgazing (though with me, a side-effect of severe reading slumps and writer's blocks is an increase in bleggalgazing). The side-project will continue (or not) - and this will be the last bump here, though it's blegrelled for you to ignore at your pleasure. In the meantime, for your consideration, the awesomest bleggalgazing ever. Fine ironies abound! Maybe I'll write about them (or not). Everything is negotiation, yo.

• Template. Where my brain spins is that every niche struggles against the niche above, fights the struggle from the niche below. 
• Inequality 101.
• Zizek on Egypt: The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent."
• UPDATE! Heh!
• Pitiful helpless giant.
• Related to the above.
• Making the mummies dance.
• Cause and effect?
• Being a vampire.
• The Egyptian Revolution, brought to you by Fox.
• On motherfucking crackers.
• 23 things they don't tell you about capitalism.
• 10 tricks to exercise your brain.
• 50 best blogs for humanities scholars? Again, I must be 51st.
• Charlie Davis?
• Vintage year for heresy and blasphemy.
• Eight dog chronicles.
• Re-visioning post-rock.
• [American Journal]
• Further than funkdream.
• Sandpaper kisses.

ADVICE TO A PROPHET

Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling.  What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, 

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.