Fireflies Are Dragging the Hush of Evening Up from the Damp Grass

I'm finishing up Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks for the umpteenth time, the backbone of Donald Harington's Stay More novels. They are charming and Kind and gallopitous and wise. They not only reveal themselves to be smarter than they appear, they reveal you, to your grateful surprise, to be smarter than you appear.

Slumpbreakers, all of them (and I needed a slump broken), poetic, magical, I keep saying this, wise. Sly. Funny. Uncanny. Kind. Where do you think I got that? I've yodeled this before cubed. Want Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks? (One blogbud tried and mehhed, but OK.) If we've been Kind, I'll buy you one. Email me.

• Democracy is FAKE!
• Digby category error.
• Professionalism.
• Pastor Sanctimonious, without irony, destroys Ayn Rand.
• Another neo-con war.
• Clinton v Clinton v Clinton.
• Drones.
• The Abu Ghraib photos you haven't seen.
• Motherfucker. Funny guy. "Nation of laws." 
• Nation of laws.
• Pig.
• The World's Shittiest Human handicaps the 2012 Pigs for POTUS.
• Gary Johnson?
• Motherfucking EVIL pig. Virginia's current hell, your future hell.
• My future hell.
• Yes, it's a holiday weekend, yes, it's been Spring break for people, but Blegsylvania, at least the Stringtown I live in, be dying, yo.
• Lit-links.
• On reading blocks, etc.....
• On DFW: Wallace made a shrewd deal with his audience when he talked of the “hard labor” involved in reading Infinite Jest. We tend to value most what costs us most, and the investment of time and work required to finish the 1,079 pages of the book is close to exorbitant, with Wallace doing everything he can to slow his readers down and prevent them from consuming the novel as a work of passive entertainment. You find yourself performing a parody of scholarship as you shuttle between the text and the endnotes, and reach for the dictionary to look up “imbricate,” “annulation,” or whether “amonymous” is a misprint or a word in its own right. (It is, I think, the former—unless it’s a coinage deriving from Amon, the goetic demon and a marquis of Hell.) If you try to speed-read the long sentences, you’re lost; you have to listen to them in your head, clause by clause, at speaking pace. The diligent reader, obedient to Wallace’s cues and commands, who takes a month or more to reach the end is entitled to feel that he’s not just read Infinite Jest but passed a graduate course in it.
• I read twenty pages of The Pale King, opened at random at page 152, at the crappy Borders at National while waiting to pick up Earthgirl and Planet yesterday, and I'm just not devout enough for scrap-book DFW.
• Passion music.
• RIP Hazel Dickens. More.
• Fire in the hole.
• Black lung.
• Pretty bird.
• A few old memories.
• Vic Chestnutt, Alejandro Escovedo, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Bardo Pond.
• Stream another Let England Shake P.J. Harvey show from last week? 
• In a joke three of you will get, the tenth word in the title of the poem below is pronounced DORF. It's not why I picked that poem for this post, but still, the joke never dindles.
• No other love.
• Summertime thing.
• After the rain.
• Morrissey autobiography? (You're correct. You've never seen a Smiths song here. Not a hater, just mehful.)

AFTER READING TU FU, I GO OUTSIDE TO THE DWARF ORCHARD

Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                         looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
                       I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
                  Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
                                           up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.