The Kiosk Shutters Crash Down

This is true: this theme song post was supposed to be today's post but I had done all the linking while thinking about it, went to save it and mistakenly hit publish, and then, well, there's no graceful unpublish in blooger. The post then got buried by the post I had created for Wednesday, so here it is again for more time at top of blog:

I found cassettes a friend I haven't thought about in twenty years gave me while looking for something else I didn't find. Isn't it always? Even if I still owned a cassette player the tapes would break. Song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song and song. Holyfuck.

I also found my stash of Bill Nelson cassettes:

There. Worth listening to again yes? Also, don't plunge publish when you don't want to publish. Also, don't start a new Friday post after you fucked up and published the original Friday post Wednesday.

The dispute between Democrats and Republicans isn't ideological, it's interpretive dance. Look at the markers on the far Right drawn that will be abandoned when this round is over. They will be mainstream, with administration and Democratic consent, by Obama's second mid-term election.

Meanwhile, Blegsylvania is dying, and I woke up today surprisingly tired of doing my part, so, barring kaboom - yesterday their were calls across the cubicles, There's another earthquake in Japan! (we fucking orkorkork for disaster porn) - I'll be back Sunday morning driving even more readers away with a United-Gax wrap-up.

• Why so many Americans hate Obama. Again, this thought experiment: what if HRC was president - what would be different?
• UPDATE! Unrestricted rise of the elite.
• We don't know the language we don't know.
• Boxed in.
• Bullshit. 
• I was going to write about today's Krugman/Brooks either/or on NYT op-ed page, but I knew this guy would, saving me the trouble.
• The consequences of no disaster-porn. 
• UPDATE! Post in haste, regret never.
• Unicorn.
• Memory.
• Meddling.
• Social mobility.
• Macaca! Getting no play in national media. Funny, that.
• Hilltop.
• Fullback sent me a Kind.
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• On being between books.  
• Two authors suggested to me last night over Thursday pints: Proust, and no, but Clarice Lispector? What would be a good one to start? Any particular translation better than others?
• New music notes.
• On why you like what you like.
• Bill Callahan.

SUICIDE OF A MODERATE DICTATOR

Elizabeth Bishop

This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;
leak from the dangling telephone earphones
sapping the festooned switchboards' strength;
fall from the windows, blow from off the sills,
—the vague, slight unremarkable contents
of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers
like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers,
crocking the way the unfocused photographs
of crooked faces do that soil our coats,
our tropical-weight coats, like slapped-at moths.

Today's a day when those who work
are idling. Those who played must work
and hurry, too, to get it downe,
with little dignity or none.
The newspapers are sold; the kiosk shutters
crash down. But anyway, in the night
the headlines wrote themselves, see, on the streets
and sidewalks everywhere; a sediment's splashed
even to the first floors of apartment houses.

This is a day that's beautiful as well,
and warm and clear. At seven o'clock I saw
the dogs being walked along the famous beach
as usual, in a shiny gray-green dawn,
leaving their paw prints draining in the wet.
The line of breakers was steady and the pinkish,
segmented rainbow steadily hung above it.
At eight two little boys were flying kites.