Find My Navel So That It Will Exist

More Planet pieces and then I will stop. She had prom last night, graduates a week from Tuesday, so won't have access to a kiln until August at K, so no more until December and what she brings home. Sorry for the shittier quality of the photos - I can't find the portfolio these are in on the pc, so I took photos just now. 

Once I start a bleggalgaze I need finish it. K asks me, you have how many active blogs? and I say it depends what you mean by active but I say three, the one you know, the one I do drafts on so if I fuck up and hit publish instead of saved the fuck-up doesn't speed-feed, a third I originally set up to write about blogging (it does fascinate me) but I've ended up in a doublefucking bleggalgazing loop, not a bad thing, just not what I had intended.

I listened again last night to Kate Bush's latest where she reworks songs already hard-wired in my brain, and, while it disturbs me down to the marrow level I can't help hehhing at how great a Lord irony is, me a blegger who earns his pings singing the same song differently today than yesterday complaining about reworking.

• We are ruled by assholes.
• On the above.
• I don't understand Obama's play on Israel. The only way I can read it is as a clumsy ploy for the Arab Street in those oil producing countries whose leaders will continue or begin killing their citizens in the with American made weapons and America's best interest at heart. Oh.
• Propaganda for the Progressive Street.
• Just saying.
  
• We are ruled by assholes.
• Cracker priorities.
• Motherfucking crackers. Yes, I know, it's not limited to motherfucking crackers.
• Heh.
• That whole rapture thing.
• Another stupid summer.
• BRT and my future hell.
• This is how much schway United has - the metro station next to RFK will be closed Sunday while there's a game at five. I'm not going anyway - it's a friendly, and I feel no moral imperative to attend friendlies - but how fucked up are people who are.
• UPDATE! Oops.
• RIP Randy Savage.
• Post-rapture reading list.
• Another rapture reading list.
• I have spent hours, not contently mostly, with Harold Bloom.
• More on Roth.
• Ghosts in the closet.
• New My Morning Jacket.
• Matapedia.
• Return of the grievous angel.
• Dancer with bruised knees.
• This tornado loves you.

OF BEING NUMEROUS, 15

George Oppen

Chorus (androgynous): 'Find me
So that I will exist, find my navel
So that it will exist, find my nipples
So that they will exist, find every hair
Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad),
Find me.'

By Way of Demonstration, He Moves Mechanically Side to Side While Making a Clicking Noise

D brought along his friend K, the one who likes to ask me about blegging, to Thursday Night Pints right when I've a bad case of bleggal frakes.* Serendipity likes to fuck with me and when it fucks with me it fucks with you.

Why do you think, what did you call it, "Blegsylvania" is dying, she asked. It's that fucking new Kate Bush release, I said, I can't get past how spiritually crushing it is, it's what I would feel like if someone newly colorized the first year of Emma Peel Avengers only worse because Kate Bush did it to herself. What the fuck are you talking about, she said, winning last night's round of ridiculously priced scotch.

Well, we just wrote tomorrow's post, I said, and I'm forbidden to bleggalgaze beyond this line, but Blegsylvania isn't dying, it's just a Wednesday afternoon more often than a Saturday morning just like everything else we supposedly do for fun.

• American exceptionalism.
• Dreams from Wayne's cinema.
• Obama, moral universalism, and realism.
• Man of steal.
• Nixonian!
• Bushian!
• The World's Shittiest Human approves!
• Carterian!
• Orwellian!
• Bellum intestinum. 
• This man must be a prophet.
• What the GOP is telling Newt.
• I don't know why the assclown wanted to openly carry a gun, but he was doing so legally and is less of a threat to me than the police and the DA.
• I posted this a couple days ago but urge you to read and consider the comments. I'd point out only that what I hardly see expressed explicitly is that maybe any equilibrium is as good as shitty humans can negotiate. Maybe it's my roobity, but I'm now as suspicious of the concept of improvement as I am of progress.
• Privatization is theft.
• Our future MOCO.
• Speaking of Kind and unKind, there are new places in Becauses left and right. As always thanks for the Kind, and please let me know if I'm unaware you're kinding me.
• Outer Beltway! There will not be a bridge on the Potomac between the American Legion and Point of Rocks if I have to chain myself to every tree in MOCO.
• Runaway goat causes backups in Gaithersburg!

• The way up is the way down.
• *If any of the three of you who got the Harington care to explain what the frakes are in comments, I'd be obliged. No? That's cool too.
• I have spent many a content hour with Frank Kermode: The manifest sense is the literal one we all grasp; the latent sense is the spiritual meaning, the secret that must be revealed by interpretation. This is true on the simplest level; there is naturally no point to an interpretation that tells us only what we all know already, what inescapably and instantly strikes the eye. An interpretation must either uncover or create a secret. For Kermode, the very existence of a text inspires interpretation, and therefore engenders secrecy.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• More on Roth's Booker: "He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".
• Fools want noise.
• Any list that makes Magnetic Fields number 97 and motherfucking Nirvana (the Raymond Carver of bands) number one is bullshit.
• Black country.
• Subways.

YOU KNOW

Mary Joe Bang

You know, don't you, what we're doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless. 

We're watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, "I knew, 

even as a child, that my mind was adding color 
to the moment." 

The one in red says, "In the dream, there was a child 
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting

that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion."

By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically 
side to side while making a clicking noise. 

His friends look away. They all know 
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch 

because we have nothing better to do. 
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd

will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, 

three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound 
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss 

with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this. 
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.

All His Island Shivered into Flowers

• More Planet art.
• I've given our tickets - mine, Landru's, Ilse's, Seat Six's - to this Sunday's friendly versus Ajax (I feel no moral obligation to attend friendlies) to friends at work, fucking hipsters all! born in the mid to late 80s. Last home game I turned to Landru and asked him if he thought there is a cultural distinction between DC fucking hipsters and Baltimore fucking hipsters, and he performed the ritualistic snort admirably.
• As for this shitty blog, my hiatusitus is deepening and Blegsylvania be dying, so links, poem, music for today. I'll see about tomorrow.
• Jack's day.
• Newt Gingrich — he’s labile like a motherfucker.
• Sean and Newt.
• Republicans are depressed.
• Better them than us.
• Itsy bitsy.
• Obamabots.
• Heh.
• A country without libraries.
• Quick question.
• There will be no bridge over the Potomac.
• You've probably heard Roth won Mann Booker. I confess, until recently I read every Roth because I thought I had to. I liked Zuckerman, neither liked or disliked most. What's interesting to me is remembering Updike v Roth debates, when novelists, within a tiny circle, were celebrities.
• Pynchon.
• Lord knows best.
• While searching for today's song I typed yourube.com. There are no accidents.
• Women who love men who love drugs.
• Play this loud, please.
• A good man is easy to kill.
• The Northern Appointment. Irwin's played them two weeks in a row - they sound like a cross between Sea and Cake and Pinback. Can't find any to post. Click on the pop-up player then click on the song. Like.
• Listen to Irwin's whole playlist, but if you haven't time, click both Amanda and Bleachy.

LIVE BLINDLY AND UPON THE HOUR

Trumball Stickney

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord, 
Who was the Future, died full long ago. 
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go, 
Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred. 
Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow 
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword; 
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord 
And the long strips of river-silver flow: 
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours. 
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight 
About their fragile hairs' aerial gold. 
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old 
Apollo springing naked to the light, 
And all his island shivered into flowers.

On a Screen the Size of a Salad Plate, Toy Airplanes Droned Over Quilted Fields

I know of the existence of Ta-Nehisi Coates, have a vague remembrance of being sent to his blog by one our progressive bleggal overlords back in the day I read our progressive bleggal overlords, but fuck if I follow him in The Atlantic, so this:

But there's very little in the way of specific, detailed policy critiques. Of what little there is, I don't know how you support a president and don't expect him to "head of the American killing machine." That's what a Commander In Chief is. I can't think of a single president, who was more committed to loving the weak and the vulnerable first. In specific, practical terms, I'm not even sure that it's a good idea, nor do I know what it means.

Tell me, is his writing always as crappy as his obamapologies are craven?

Please please please holyfuck, Feingold 2012! I will donate money and time for the megagiggles alone. I'll even keep kayfabe until Feingold stuns Obama in Iowa, though I won't need to after Obama orders a drone strike on Feingold's tour bus on its way to New Hampshire at a rest stop off I-90 near Dunkirk NY.

• On complicity. Mine, yours, ours.
• Outgunned in the War on Bullshit.
• Understanding hacks and their hackery.
• A frothy mix of fecal matter and lube.
• Three pigs, Newt the least.
• Pssst... he's in it for the money.
• Things you might have missed.
• Controlling the flood.
• Out of work.
• Purple Line!
• My current and future hell. It's Rockville, not North Bethesda.
• Get off my lawn!
• The longest street in DC with no traffic control.
• MFAs: Griping about the "cookie-cutter" short stories and hothouse atmosphere of the MFA literary world already seemed old hat back when I was first asked to write about it for Salon, in 1997. The mistaken belief that everyone enrolled in such programs writes minimalist stories à la Raymond Carver is also surprisingly persistent. That's probably true, though it's also true Raymond Carver SUCKS unto SUCKITY SUCK.
• Mahler's symphonies online.
• The heavenly music corporation.
• The world's greatest.
• Here's one of Planet's pieces:

THE WAR AFTER THE WAR

Debora Gregor

I

Where were the neighbors? Out of town?
In my pajamas, I sat at my father's feet
in front of their squat, myopic television, 
the first in our neighborhood.

On a screen the size of a salad plate,
toy airplanes droned over quilted fields.
Bouquets of jellyfish fell: parachutes abloom,
gray toy soldiers drifting together, drifting apart— 

the way families do, but I didn't know that yet. 
I was six or seven. The tv was an aquarium: 
steely fish fell from the belly of a plane, 
then burst into flame when they hit bottom. 

A dollhouse surrendered a wall, the way such houses do. 
Furniture hung onto wallpaper for dear life. 
Down in the crumble of what had been a street, 
women tore brick from brick, filling a baby carriage. 


II

What was my young father, 
just a few years back from that war, 
looking for? The farm boy from Nebraska
he'd been before he'd seen Dachau? 

Next door, my brother and sister fought
the Battle of Bedtime, bath by bath. 
Next door, in the living room,
a two-tone cowboy lay where he fell,
too bowlegged to stand. Where was his horse?
And the Indian who'd come apart at the waist—
where were his legs to be found? 
A fireman, licorice-red from helmet to boot, 

a coil of white rope slung over his arm 
like a mint Lifesaver, tried to help. 
A few inches of ladder crawled under a cushion, 
looking for crumbs. Between the sag of couch 

and the slump of rocker, past a pickle-green soldier, 
a plastic foxhole, cocoa brown, dug itself
into the rug of no man's land 
and waited to trip my mother. 


III

Am I the oldest one here? In the theater, 
the air of expectation soured by mouse and mold— 
in the dark, a constellation of postage stamps:
the screens of cell phones glow.

And then we were in Algiers, we were in Marseille. 
On foot, we fell in behind a ragged file 
of North African infantry. Farther north 
than they'd ever been, we trudged

straight into the arms of the enemy: 
winter, 1944. Why did the French want to live in France, 
the youngest wondered while they hid, 
waiting capture by the cold. 

They relieved a dead German soldier
of greatcoat and boots. Village by muddy village,
they stole, shadow to shadow, trying to last 
until the Americans arrived— 

as if, just out of range of the lens,
the open trucks of my father's unit 
would rumble over the rutted horizon.
Good with a rifle, a farsighted farm boy

made company clerk because he'd learned to type
in high school—how young he would look, 
not half my age, and no one to tell him
he'll survive those months in Europe,

he'll be spared the Pacific by Hiroshima.
Fifty years from then, one evening, 
from the drawer where he kept 
the tv remote, next to his flint-knapping tools, 

he'd take out a small gray notebook 
and show his eldest daughter 
how, in pencil, in tiny hurried script,
he kept the names of those who died around him.

Let Darkness Lap at Your Sides. Give Darkness an Inch

Last night I attended Walter Johnson High School's 2011 Awards Ceremony (Planet walked across stage to receive the award for Excellence in Three-Dimensional Art - she sculpts). The ceremony took two and a half hours; there were dozens of special awards, plus the awards for each department, then the reading of National Merit Scholars. The principal (who's leaving to take a job up the ladder and received standing ovations and whoops), apologized for the length, saying, consider the cause for the length, the remarkable number of remarkable students. A wonderful evening.

This morning:

Under the plan, the council would cut $25 million from the $1.4 billion it contributed to the public school system this year. It would also take more control over the way the schools, and other county agencies, save to cover retiree health insurance.

The council would largely direct the school cuts to an account covering employee benefits, said Ervin, a former Board of Education member. The goal, she said, is to keep the cuts from affecting classrooms, while making sure that school employees share in countywide budget cuts.

Fuck you. I've said this before: my wife is a public school teacher, one of my best friends is a public school teacher, both my parents were public school teachers as were two of my favorite aunts and two of my favorite uncles, so I plead FULL DISCLOSURE AND SELF-INTEREST AND BLIND SPOT when I say.... when I say.... when I say twelve hours ago I was glowing and now I'm heartsick again. It was a nice four days pretending I wasn't anguishing the clusterfuck.

• Honoring the particular.
• Politics of revenge and submission.
• Police state. Well, not quite yet, there's work still to be done, which is why Corporate will ensure motherfucking Obama is reelected.
• On the above. You know, I've never denied my complicity, but at least I'm not wiring the panopticon for a living, I'm just helping Corporate train the next generation of neo-cons and Chicago economists (who order and control the panopticon).
• Disobedience? Really?
• The way things aren't.
• Matty and Megan.
• Insupportable policy versus overambitious force.
• Wheaton!
• Vote for your favorite Metro map redesign!
• Fresh episodes of heartsickness make me listen to Will Oldham:

• The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels.
• Kertzer. Though I gave up on KEXP, your fucking Fleet Foxes, Arcade Fucking Fire, Fucking Hipster Top 40 station, I still tuned into the weekly archives of Best Ambience.
• Rudy Foolish.
• 2/15.
• The sounds are always begging.
• I am drinking again.
• Raining in darling.
• Your will miss me when I burn.

THE SCIENCES SING A LULLBYE

Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down. 

Maybe You Spend a Weekend Faking a French Accent, Maybe You Buy an Even More Expensive Stereo and Build a Separate and Self-Sufficient World Inside the Garage

I thoroughly enjoyed not anguishing the clusterfuck over the weekend. I enjoyed pre-game pints with a digital friend who is now analog. I enjoyed STANDING! w/mine and screaming at Dax. I enjoyed Planet's last piano recital ever (it's a good thing; more later, or not). I enjoyed listening to Talking Heads and Eno. I didn't enjoy driving readers away - and a Byrne post, an Eno post, a United post drives readers away, oh yes they do - but I enjoyed giving less of a damn than once I would have enough to bump Robert Fripp's birthday to the top of this post.

Robert Fripp is sixty-five today. I liked early King Crimson enough to listen contently if you it put on, I loved King Crimson (Version Four) enough to buy and play vinyl, but I didn't follow Fripp after unless it was played for me, which I listen to contently (WFMU plays him often) - I'm told it's proof that I'm not a guitar player that I noticed Belew's gimmicks over Fripp's genius, and who am I to argue. For instance:

My Fripp story : Fripp had a touring workshop called Guitar Craft and a performing ensemble, The League of Crafty Guitarists. A bunch of us (Elric, you were there, yes?) got in Phavid Dillips lime-green VW van and drove to an old yellow mansion in West Virginia, not far, past Harpers Ferry, up near Shepardstown. Phavid, who we thought an excellent guitarist - or at least the best guitarist we smoked dope with regularly - had been invited to sit in a circle of other guitarists with Robert Fripp leading the workshop. Incredibly cool actually. Guests were invited to sit in the circle; guess who refused. Afterward, going out for a smoke, I ran into him on a porch and apologized. He asked me why I didn't sit in the circle. I said I didn't want to. He said, then you've nothing to apologize for, and shook my hand.

Requests solicited! (and sorry, I know the below cuts out early, but still.....)

• Zizek: Un-Shock Doctrine: The Left today faces the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing with political economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.
• How can the Left win?
• Once. Twice. Three times.
• The welfare state.
• Krugman's bankruptcy.
• Obama's Midas touch.
• Freedom's just another word for blowing shit up.
• Junk justice.
• Being poor is a crime.
• Offered for you to make your own comment.
• How Fox works. 
• Internet Kill Switch and.....
• Huckabee sensibly chooses Fox's money.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.

That's Callie, beloved and missed by this guy, as is Little One below. Send me you cats, alive on earth or alive in mind.

• The indigenous American berserk.
• A rejection letter.
• Everything future.
• Poetry and the White House.
• Every ten years or there's another Henry Green revival. I went for the one twenty years ago, confess I don't get the fuss. Now, Murial Spark, yes. 
• Adrienne Rich, who I admire but do not love, is 82 today.
• Canon yadda.
• A follow-up.  
• Nothing stays put.
• Stream the new Kate Bush. I can't describe how depressed this makes me. No, literally, I can't. Believe me, I would if I could. More later. Or not. 
• Paradise is not so bad. Holyfuck, I love Pollard.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Here comes the flood.
• Evening star.
• Breathless.

THE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH A GLASS OF ICE WATER

Dobby Gibson

There are a billion reasons to look down
into a casket, but just one way to lie in it dead,
which proves there isn't anything 
you can think of that isn't here for the living,
who are each alive for a short time
in a very different way. 
After she moves out, one tears up grass blades
to watch which way the wind blows.
Just over there, another buried his favorite dog
and now look at that tree! 
Would you like to model for me?
says the lousy painter 
to every woman who walks within earshot.
Feeling a little dead?
Maybe you spend a weekend 
faking a French accent,
maybe you buy an even more expensive stereo
and build a separate and self-sufficient world
inside the garage. 
Something happens something happens something happens.
Repetition repetition repetition. 
The saddest painting I ever saw 
was on the carpet in my friend's hallway
where he tripped one night
carrying a gallon of red.
This was just before the divorce.
Just after he told me he was trapped 
inside some idea of himself,
one he swore bore no relation
to what the rest of us had been seeing.
"Nice shirt" has always meant too many things.

Sixty-Three Today

• The true wheel.
• Everything merges with the night.
• By this river.
• Music for airports 1. 
• Lantern marsh. 
• Drift. 
• This.

United 1, Colorado 1

Nothing symbolizes the state of MLS - not the thin talent, the reckless tackles, the empty stands, the bad pitches - more than Terry Fucking Vaughn, simply the worse of MLS' consistently shitty referees (even if he is the biggest asshole of the bunch). He cost neither team the game - the undeserved PK came minutes after one he didn't call - but his performance, which was not any shittier than any other game he has refereed, encapsulates and represents the very essence of rinkydinkness in MLS that no number of franchises or new stadiums can erase.

United - St Benny, how come your team comes out flat and full of itself? All the fucking time? What do they think they have won? In the last game of  a three game home stand with two dropped points already, ahead of a month of road games, playing against not only the defending MLS champion but a team that kicked United's ass a month ago, United comes out slow and uninspired, disorganized and soft. Pontius said Ben "lit a fire under us at halftime." Partyboy, (a) you're a motherfucking professional who shouldn't need a fire lit under you and (b) since you obviously do need a fire lit under you, why the fuck is Benny waiting until halftime to light the fire?

Stuff:

• This guy.
• Najar needs smacking. Two good games then he's back to loafing as if his presence alone is awesome enough. And stop diving.
• Simms is done. He would have received at least two red cards if he wasn't so slow on his reckless tackles as to miss his target. His first impulse always has been to backpass; he is incapable now of not backpassing.
• When United is good again Ngwenya will be gone and he's useless (though with a good motor) now: why not give minutes to Brettschneider and see what you have?
• White had a tough night, though got better as game went on.
• Kitchen might settle in to right back, a gaping hole since Brian Namoff's concussions and subsequent retirement, but the number three pick in a loaded draft on a right back?
• Dax. Fullback, among many interesting things to say, talks about Dax's better second half and how and why it might have happened.
• Who knows how much the field contributed to Wolff's and Davies' injuries, but DCU must lead the league in hammies and groin knacks over the years.

Twelve points out of ten games. Prorates out to 41 points out of 34 games. That's 16 points more, over 34 games, than last year. Progress is being made. If next year United wins the game last week against Dallas and last night against Colorado that they tied this year (and would have lost last year), that's a trajectory to hope for.

The problems that currently exist go beyond St Benny not screaming enough. That Benny needs to scream at a team that averaged .7 points per game last year and is filled with rookies trying to make a career, journeymen trying to stay in the league and grandpas playing for one final contract is discouraging. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect anything more than a modest increase in points. It isn't unreasonable to expect and demand United play hard and urgently all ninety minutes of every game.