One Morning after a Storm.... So Poetry Configures Its Comparisons

I time-stamped the second I read about what I thought would be the next big media shitstorm - I though, think how happy the suits at Fox and CNN will be - because, regardless of any facts released since or in the future, everyone (including you, me) would hysterically and luxuriously default to his or her current moral/political zeitgeist's interpretation reflexively, in my case the arch self-congratulatory and self-deprecating self-rebuking of a recent apostate.

As of seven this morning, it's buried on the Post's front webpage, doesn't appear at all on the NYT's front webpage, and none of the mouth-breathers at the Corner have started woofing, so maybe I'm wrong about everyone but me. On the other hand, I was going to write more about Maryland's uniform in general and my willfully incoherent aesthetic of uniforms in lengthy particular (plus more Harkin v Obama nonsense), so lucky you, consider yourself spared. Look! I did it again!

• Towards an aesthetics of entropy (part two).
• Cassandra and the limits to growth.
• School Reform: A Failing Grade. Standard disclaimer: my wife is a public school teacher, one of my best friends is a public school teacher, my mother and father were public school teachers, some of my favorite aunts and uncles were school teachers, so I am completely pro-teacher; I post links about public education that strike me as important but because of my immense conflict of interest I wont hazard a comment past that.
• Neo-liberalism redux.
• Was there an alternative?
• Double-dose of Chomsky.
• Stoller has a new piece up on smearing Schneiderman and Your Fucking Washington Post's fucking washingtonpostness.
• Obamapologist responds to Stoller. 
• Disuse your illusion.
• Crackers and pigs.
• Do you suffer from PDS? 
• Two reasons it may not be the shitstorm I thought it would be: (1) those shot were soldiers, not a Villager, and the Villagers don't give a shit about soldiers, and (2) POTUS 12 sucks all the air out of the media vacuum. 
• Peter Pan finally to die. 
• My future hell.
• The million basic plots. 
• Twenty iconic book covers.
• The Long Booker. Nobel will be announced in a month, I haven't seen the traditional Is this the year Philip Roth wins the Nobel stories in Blegsylvania or real life yet.

Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori - Rejoinder from RVNG Intl. on Vimeo.




HOW SIMILE WORKS

Albert Goldbarth

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys 
of some city; 
                      and the brickwork back 
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise 
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth 
the next day; 
                      and the brackish puddles sectioning 
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons. 

My wife and I have been arguing; now 
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, 
stroking her back, her naked back that was 
the particles in the heart of a star and will be 
again, and is hers, and is like nothing 
else, and is like the components of everything.

Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori - Dream Sequence from RVNG Intl. on Vimeo.