imagine the very first marriage a girl and boy trembling with some inchoate need for ceremony a desire for witness

I caught myself writing like I promised myself I wouldn't, like I don't want to and probably can't anymore. There's lots of provocative thoughts in the links and their comments below. I'm still synthesizing them; thank you sincerely for making me think, but holyfuck, looking in tablet I'm reminded it's best to sometimes do it off-blog. Not that I'll ever find answers there, just inchoate incoherence always.

But my daughter will be twenty-seven in 2020. Tell me, should we assume nine more years of Corporate's serbianizing of America? Tell me, what are Corporate's real issues and what idiot-like-me chum am I fed in the run-up to that election? Is everything the same, just worse, progressed inexorably along the teleological trajectory you foresee today? Resistance? Who to what and how?

She'll be thirty-nine in 2032. Tell me.

• I don't see Corporate not fighting to the death, do you?
• Not funny, not clever, not your girlfriend.
• I would give $100 just to imagine pissing off Obamadick, but who? I say this all the fucking time: there's no money to be made demagoguing from the Left? 
• And yes, Old-Timers, it has been awhile since I used the "old-girl friend who chained herself to virgin forest trees who used the tug-of-rope argument for obviously far spectrum politics." I caught myself using it in tablet; hence this post's first paragraph. 
• UPDATE! BTW, I meant to say that my first reaction to the Norway terrorist attacks was that it was a motherfucking Norwegian cracker/christer who hates Norwegian "socialism," but I'm just a leftwing elitist bigot.
• I tried hard to betray you and the Republicans wouldn't let me.
• I linked to Dear Progressives a couple of days and 172 comments ago.
• Good luck.
• An obamapologist drowning in an inch of water.
• Your motherfucking president.
• Occupy Wall Street?
• Daily doh.
• Elizabeth Warren makes it personal, chooses wrong target. 
• Jennifer Rubin really is The Second Shittiest Human on the planet.
• Las Vegas and the simulacrum of desire.
• Marshall McLuhan's centennial was this past Thursday. Fabio played some McLuhan tapes. It's a shame the first thing I think about when hearing the name Marshall McLuhan is that dumbass Woody Allen movie. 
• Yes, I do know I'm unworthy, thanks!
• In through the back door.
• Come here.
• Name everything.
• A slight return home.

THE FIRST MARRIAGE

Peter Meinke

imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do

Thus, Our Bawdiness, Unpurged by Epitaph, Indulged at Last, Is Equally Converted into Palms, Squiggling Like Saxophones

No Thursday Night Pints. Two are out of town and the heat index was 117, and fuck that. All day yesterday I felt like I'd STOOD! outside in hundred plus heat index two-and-a-half hours the night before. It's stupid hot. So stupid hot I might not STAND! for a fucking exhibition game v Liverpool Juniors Saturday night. If it was a league game or Cup game or, HEY! remember when United suffered from motherfucking clusterfuckage and played in major international club tournaments? I'd have been required to STAND! in 117 heat index for one of those games if Kasper Payne hadn't fixed that problem. ripday, I'll email you still Saturday morning, but it might end up another night.

Like I do everyday I wrote yesterday about my latent bigotries and how they salve my complicity. I've seven or eight tablet false starts at following up - I need a new way to paraphrase it, don't you know - so until then I commend to you comments from Frances and KFO for sharp insights into the problem.

HEY! Know what's worse than a heat index of 117?

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay.

 -  Gaddis, The Recognitions

• Beyond parody.
• The rich are the welfare state.
• Shifting costs.
• Did Wall Street kill rock and roll?
• Gang of pain.
• Is there something worse than despicable?
• Obamadick.
• Verily, fuck the Democrats. 
• UPDATE! Bleggalgazing.
• Elizabeth Drew is as honest a reporter a Villager can be.
• Understanding the debt crisis.
• What happens August 3? 
• Because ideas are bulletproof.
• Ruling Britannia. 
• Frothy mix of fecal matter and lube markets frothy mix of fecal matter and lube!

• Olde Towne!
• Beallsville!
• My future hell.
• My future hell.
• Clarksburg!
• Look what I found in one of my stacks:

• Jeebus, when was the last time you thought about Wayne Booth?
• Steven's poem: the reality show.
• Haiku the economy! 

• Yours welcome in comments. 
• RIP Lucian Freud.
• Some lit-links.
• Potentially horrifying news. Jesus, what a shitty band.
• UPDATE! I get the Jane, you ignorant slut treatment!
• Other than P.J. Harvey, who gets love love love at this shitty blog, on the Mercury Prize list I've heard Elbow (and not enthusiastically) and none of the other acts.

THE HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMEN


Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

The Governor Will Give Homeless People Sleeping Bags, Let Them Stay the Night on Windswept Porticos Outside His Buildings Instead of Your Doorstep

I stopped at a bar in Beltsville before last night's game to have a beer and work on the above. The bar was almost empty, I found a quiet corner, but ten minutes later four electrical contractors from somewhere other than here came in and took up chairs near me at the bar. What you, a scientist or something, one asked, looking at my pens, my writing. Just doodling, I said. They watched for another minute or two then lost interest.

Obama's a socialist, don't you know. Goddamn Democrats are socialists, don't you know. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and nine-tenths of the Republicans are traitors and pussies, don't you know. Country's going to hell, don't you know. This isn't to slam them - their mythology is no more or less stupid than mine. Why the fuck isn't the draft beer cold, one asked. Good question.

Species of motherfucking red ants - it's only our survival instinct that keeps us from killing each other. Here's the root of my rube: what if society is, at any given moment, as good, by whatever definition of good you choose, as this species is capable? We've been indoctrinated to consider that question taboo.

• Bankster puppet. 
• Banksters.
• Determined to disembowel.
• Wall Street's euthanasia of industry.
• Murdoch and the destruction of the Left.
• No.
• American tool insufficiently pro-American.
• Standard Warren disclaimer aside, Obamadick's a motherfucker.
• Propaganda.
• On the above.
• Serendipitously, found this the day after posting the original.
• The five-albums test.
• Black Country.
• Hey Moon.

PROCLAMATION

Stuart Dischell

The governor will give
Homeless people sleeping bags,
Let them stay the night

On windswept porticos
Outside his buildings
Instead of your doorstep.

I am talking to myself
With empty rooms
I cannot bear to live in.

United 0, Ningland 1

Ilse can vouch - one minute before Ningland scored I turned to her and said, "they're going to lose this game."

If Charlie Davies was one-tenth as good as he thinks he is he'd be starting for Barca. Who didn't expect him to gack the PK? He can't create his own shot, he has no imagination or skills with the ball on his feet, his only asset is his speed and the motherfucker won't run. Wait - throw yourself to the ground, you diving motherfucker.

And bless Clyde Simms for his years of service, he's worse than cooked, he's a liability, defensively, offensively. Good back pass, Clyde! PLEASE put Kitchen in holding mid and let him get seasoned. United's a mediocre team in a mediocre league - if and when they're good again Simms will be gone and Kitchen a fixture - give him the minutes at holding mid now, figure something out for right back.

Wondering If I'll Be Able to Decipher What He Means By His Yes

That's a screen shot from Talking Points Memo grabbed last night say 7:00, half a scroll down from the banner. Sorry for poor quality, but I'm a techtard. Still, notice: there are no accidents around here.

Think though, fellow pwoggles, as much as Corporate disdains us, think how much they disdain the cracker base, doubly-fucking the motherfuckers with a sell-out on economic principles while Hey Look! Legal Fags! on the other.

Hah, got you. They disdain us just as much, prove it daily as necessary, would and will fuck you over as blithely when needed.

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true, and they've a game tonight v the team that deliberately crippled Branko Boskovic, the dirtiest team, season in, season out, in Major Lame Soccer, so win please, for Branko, for the points, but mostly to win a goddamn home game.

When modern devices fail, it is our nature to reach back among the cures of our fathers. If those fail, there were fathers before them. We can reach back for centuries. Gwyon appreciated the extended hands of his people less and less as the months passed. The doctors refused him information, guarding the frail secrets of their failing magic as carefully as Zuni priests planting prayer sticks. And there was that hallowed tribal agreement among them never to admit one another's mistakes, which they called Ethics.

On the other, spiritual hand, the congregation breathed out stale prayers for the boy's recovery. But in the end they always gave their God full leave to do as He wished, to remove the lad if such were His sacred whim, loading the fever-stricken boy with the guilt in had taken them generations to accumulate. They called this Humility.

- Gaddis, The Recognitions.

• On my complicity, your complicity, his complicity.
• Battered Obama Syndrome.
• Poke.
• The class politics of the debt ceiling crisis.
• Titanic.
• Foggy days.
• War.
• It isn't?
• Drones.
• The U.S. love affair with drones.
• Predator drones and the international mafia.
• Max Boot?

• Things you might have missed.
• Yes, yes I do know I'm unworthy. Thanks!
• Comus!
• The argument.
• Stream this week's new releases? I hadn't though about Shonen Knife in a decade.
• Agnes Obel. It's love.
• New M83.
• Hundred highways.
• Right now.
• The only one of you.
• Rejoinder. 
• Talking to myself.
• Woke up with this in my head:

YES

Denise Duhamel

According to Culture Shock:
A Guide to Customs and Etiquette 
of Filipinos, when my husband says yes,
he could also mean one of the following:
a.) I don't know.
b.) If you say so.
c.) If it will please you.
d.) I hope I have said yes unenthusiastically enough
for you to realize I mean no.
You can imagine the confusion 
surrounding our movie dates, the laundry,
who will take out the garbage
and when. I remind him 
I'm an American, that all has yeses sound alike to me.        
I tell him here in America we have shrinks 
who can help him to be less of a people-pleaser. 
We have two-year-olds who love to scream "No!" 
when they don't get their way. I tell him, 
in America we have a popular book,
When I Say No I Feel Guilty.
"Should I get you a copy?" I ask.
He says yes, but I think he means
"If it will please you," i.e. "I won't read it."
"I'm trying," I tell him, "but you have to try too."
"Yes," he says, then makes tampo,
a sulking that the book Culture Shock describes as
"subliminal hostility . . . withdrawal of customary cheerfulness
in the presence of the one who has displeased" him.
The book says it's up to me to make things all right,
"to restore goodwill, not by talking the problem out,
but by showing concern about the wounded person's
well-being." Forget it, I think, even though I know
if I'm not nice, tampo can quickly escalate into nagdadabog--
foot stomping, grumbling, the slamming
of doors. Instead of talking to my husband, I storm off
to talk to my porcelain Kwan Yin,
the Chinese goddess of mercy
that I bought on Canal Street years before
my husband and I started dating.
"The real Kwan Yin is in Manila,"
he tells me. "She's called Nuestra Señora de Guia.
Her Asian features prove Christianity
was in the Philippines before the Spanish arrived."
My husband's telling me this
tells me he's sorry. Kwan Yin seems to wink,
congratulating me--my short prayer worked.
"Will you love me forever?" I ask,
then study his lips, wondering if I'll be able to decipher
what he means by his yes.

No Luck, No Golden Chances, No Mitigating Circumstances Now. It's Only Common Sense, There Are No Accidents Around Here

There are no accidents round here: within twenty minutes these two items appeared on Your Fucking Washington Post (and everywhere else) this afternoon:

Corporate gets: Appearing at the regular White House news briefing, Obama said the bipartisan proposal is “broadly consistent” with the approach he has advocated in that it reduces discretionary spending and tackles health-care spending and entitlements while also raising additional revenue.

Pwoggles get: The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it will support a congressional effort to repeal a federal law that defines marriage as a legal union between a man and woman.

How it works: Corporate gets to start seriously gutting social safety nets, pwoggles get a vague promise on a social issue Obama will never have to repay (plus the admittedly wonderful and addictive joy at imagining motherfucking cracker head's exploding). I bet pints on Obamadick's reelection. I offer you 4-1.

Was going to lead with this tomorrow, but tomorrow is a High Holy Day at BLCKDGRD, and while BLCKDGRD is never completly aargh-free I try make High Holy Days as aargh-free as possible.







Besides, I desperately need to get this song and this song out of my head.

Amorous Ghosts Will Pursue Us for a Time, but Sometimes They Get, You Know, Confused and Forget to Stop When We Do, as They Continue to Populate This Fertile Land with Their Own Bizarre Self-Imaginings

I don't have a plan. I don't mean a plan like down in links your bleggal overlords wonk policy, with math and graphs and everything! They still believe enough of our elite are rational assholes misguided on best practices, that an equilibrium between elite greed and the helps' needs can be fairly negotiated. Our elite are rational assholes, and they've decided those Micronesian islands with no extradition treaties don't buy themselves. Our bleggal overlords are morons.







No, I mean I don't have a plan how I'm to integrate reading The Recognitions into the daily tongue-diving with kayfabe that is this shitty blog, but:


Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May's rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt's direction (though as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and interns X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electronic machinery.


Please read that out loud for full effect, to feel your mouth move.

I don't have a plan for The Recognitions beyond reading it (out loud when possible) and posting snippets that make me giggle and/or gasp here. No reading group is suggested nor will be housed here. Go find a copy yourself if you're curious, but POW! a novel about the nature of kayfabe in an era when the elite are breaking kayfabe? When nothing is more fun to consider than kayfabe? In July, during the Blog Days of Summer, in dying Stringtown Blegsylvania, the summer before a presidential election Blog Days of Summer year?

• There is no progressive case for deficit cutting.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
• Liberal politics.
• Why Liberals are lame.
• Krugman is increasingly radical? Maybe, but not enough.
• Saying no to compromise.
• Alice in Billlionaireland.
• France next.
• Unmediated.
• The former.
• Cultural illogic.
• Today is SeatSix's and Elric's (who is still too pissed off about something to contribute here in comments any more) father's 79th birthday. 
• I am shocked to learn Vincent Gray is a corrupt asshole.
• Purple Line.
• Being a midget on PCP is no excuse.
• Herman Melville's lifetime literary earnings.
• Silliman's always awesomely generous lit links.
• They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Think about those two sentences, square in the middle of the paragraph, physically and contextually.
• What you can buy me for my birthday. (h/t)
• Geek the girl.

MOTTLED TUESDAY

John Ashbery

Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

But I Will Turn My Face Away from This Ruin of Summer, Collapse of Fur and Bone

Ken Beatrice (he doesn't eat the curly-fries, he's been told they're very good) always said that more games are lost than won. Crediting the USWNT with losing the game doesn't deny the Japanese their victory any more than crediting the Brazilians with losing the game didn't deny the USWNT a place in the semifinals (the symmetry of the two games is remarkable, actually). I point this out because once this bullshit kabuki plays out exactly like you think it will, the debate will be more about who lost the fight than who won. It's started already.

Also, this post exists because I've a bunch of good links with rapidly approaching expiration dates (if they haven't already passed), plus, guess what band's cassette tapes I found last night while looking for something else:

• Documenting the Peace Laureate's progressive atrocities.
• War in Iran this Fall?
• On the above.
• On the above.
• Now starring Yemen and Somalia!
• America's disappeared.
• We're spent.
• Crisis of growth.
• They're going to cut to the bone and keep the fat.
• It's started already.
• The glory of radicalism through inaction.
• Balloon payment.
• Mad libs.
• Moving closer.
• Convert's syndrome.
• Hacktacular!
• Motherfucking crackers come in all colors. 
• Politics and race in DC.
• Speaking of Beatrice, what was his favorite flavor milkshake?
• My future hell. 
• Speaking of Beatrice, a reminder that Kony Tornheiser is an asshole. 
• The Bayou.
• It's debatable whether I'm anti-Christian, though I can declare I'm anti-Christer. 
• UPDATE! Wait! Ro Laren is still on TV?
• The best fraud of his generation. I wonder if he's read The Recognitions. I am again, will be posting passages when I feel like it, like this, the opening sentence: Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. A novel about the nature of kayfabe: sounds timely, is laugh out loud funny.
• Field trip.
• Field Mice.
• Forty noises that built pop.
• Benediction.
• Circulation.
• Well of loneliness.
• This Nelson Rockefeller.
• Should the Bible be banned?
• Get a knife between your teeth.

ON THE SKELETON OF A HOUND

James Wright

Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move 
Around the body.  Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer.  Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for these bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.

    I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.

USWNT 2, Japan 2 (Japan 3-1 in PK)

In the 112th minute Ian Darke, ESPN carnival barker, says, "the US is eight minutes from winning and sparking a national celebration," which made me wish Japan would win, and I'm sorry. I wasn't invested in this team - it's not lack of damn but lack of time - but I've loved ones who are. But ESPN's shilling - and I don't watch helmetball or basketball, maybe they shill for everything - of the major significance of this game pissed me off, and anyone who thinks a victory would mean more to the US citizenship than the Japanese - as in Japan post-earthquake and tsunami - is a moron. (Speaking of morons and barkers: Julie Foudy.)

Game ball to Japan's Iwashimuzu who deliberately took a red card taking down a breakaway for Alex Morgan in the 120th minute, though to be fair, without the US's shockingly inept finishing, its clownish and panicky defending, and its choke-choke-choking in PK, Japan doesn't win. Japan doesn't win if the US doesn't think it won the game twice. Japan didn't win, the USWNT lost.

Read this guy. He knows the players on USWNT, having been a season-ticket holder for the Germantown Freedom before they up and split for Florida. He can speak towards his loathing for Rachel Buehler and why I'm wrong to say Hope Solo had a miserable game and why I'm wrong to ask why Alex Morgan didn't start (I thought she was the best player on the field).

But rely on me to draw the strained metaphor: there are echoes in the USWNT's choke and collapse amid media screaming of their exceptionality that redound on many levels. Perhaps I'll tease them out later, or not - we're going out to eat the best Indian food in MOCO with Hamster in a couple of minutes - though tease them out yourself, or not.

Dallas 0, United 0

God, that was a horrible soccer game. I'm gonna let this guy do most of the work, adding these bullets:

• Good thing Dallas sucks too.
• The white road kit only emphasizes how shitty the shitty red kit is.
• Kitchen's best game at right back, Hamid's best game in goal.
• Clyde Simms, bless his years of service, is beyond cooked, he's a liability. Those passes from White and McDonald that got intercepted? Most were because Simms can't get to where he needs to be.
• If United has a kangaroo court, they should be fining Chris Pontius $$$ every time he's in the box with the ball on his right foot that he doesn't shoot. Shoot the fucking ball.
• Expect all teams to play the same defense - anyone but De Rossario - here on out.
• It was a shocking reminder to see how thin United is with all the concussed players - Ngwenya? Fred (who will be gone after this Wednesday night's game)? Imagine the trialists and bottom reservists we'll see next Saturday in exhibition v Everton.

Yes, I'd have taken four points before the road trip with glee, yes, the game was played in 150 degree heat index, no, I didn't expect United to break even in possession, but no, I didn't expect them to come out flat. What a shitty game. I expect better this Wednesday night at home v Ningland, the most important three points since the last and until the next.