I’ve Also Been Pardoned Miraculously for Years by the Lava of Chance which Runs Down the World’s Gullies, Silting Us Back

That busted my sour mood, though, also, remember when some UC-Davis cop walked up and down a sitting line of student protesters and peppered-sprayed them and it caused a burp of dramatic pro-Occupy sentiment and created a (we thought) toxic meme as did the University president's perp-walk? Me too! Decades ago.

Also:

GROUP A - Poland, Greece, Russia, Czech Republic

GROUP B - Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Portugal

GROUP C - Spain, Italy, Republic of Ireland, Croatia

GROUP D - Ukraine, Sweden, France, England

Sure, fuck Denmark.

Also, I commented on myself how stupidly evil is the ritual turkey-pardoning POTUS photo-op and SHAZAM! I'm driving around last night, click to WETA to hear what shitty Haydn or Mozart they're playing, and the voice-over actor masquerading as classical DJ says, WETA is also sponsored by George Washington's Mount Vernon, which invites you to a candlelight Christmas - music, party favors, and meet the pardoned Thanksgiving turkey! Jeebusfuck, shoot me, but as always, awed nods of faith towards Serendipity.

Also: watch George Pakled and She Is As Shitty As the World's Shittiest Human try to draw the long knives against Gingrichgasm:

• Being-toward-#OneDayLeft.
• Police state.
• Panopticon.
• Police state.
• Panopticon.
• Police state.
• Of course they did. When I take blankets and shit to Freedom Plaza, I'm looked at w/suspicion, as I - and anyone else - should be. Tomorrow, for instance. Email me if you want to donate anything, I'll come pick it up.
• Motherfuckers.
• Lots of good news!
• Police state.
• I'm convinced Corporate wants Obamasshole reelected.
• The Democrats are not your friend.

ACCIDENTS OF BIRTH

William Meredith

Je vois les effroyables espaces de l’Univers qui m’enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans savoir pourquoi je suis plutôt en ce lieu qu’en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m’est donné à vivre m’est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l’éternité qui m’a précédé, et de toute qui me suit.

—Pascal, Pensées sur la religion


The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

—Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House

Spared by a car or airplane crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

For I’ve been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps. And I’ve also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world’s gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

                     But it’s not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-

ball, in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats—

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

When You Consider the Abundance of Such Resource as Illuminates the Glow-Blue Bodies and Gold-Skeined Wings of Flies Swarming the Dumped Guts of a Natural Slaughter or the Coil of Shit and in No Way Winces from Its Storms of Generosity

Jeebusfuck, I'm busy, angry, frustrated, strung-out, empty, bursting to nothing, sad, manic, enervated, wired, anxious, aarghful, and then oddly serene for sporadic seconds at a time, plus there is terrible news for one of my Thursday Night Pint buds, so fast easy rage today for multiple reasons, then links, poem, songs:

GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich defended his stance against certain child labor laws during a campaign stop in Iowa Thursday, saying that children born into poverty aren’t accustomed to working unless it involves crime.

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.

The lead headline, as I type this, at Your Fucking Washington Post:

Newt Gingrich as president could turn the White House into an ideas factory

• On YFWP's gingrichgasm. Thanks. Saves me the effort.
• That's actually one of my five favorite songs ever.
• Police state.
• Police state.
• Police state.
• Wag your beards.
• Police state.
• Foreverywhere war.
• Criminal state.
• Oligarchy.
• Police state.
• Debt and democracy.
• Occupy Democrats. 
• UPDATE! On the above.
• Throw Lenin a handful of coins if you can.
• Shock Doctrine from the left.
• Rocky Anderson? Not Dave Anderson of Hutton Street, at least.
• Excellent read on Shia-Sunni schism past and present.
• Jim does linkages.
• How much in tax dollars does this shit cost me?
• 15 MPH.
• Good news. Diver.
• On the diver. Oh, this too: Meantime, Yorks said English club West Brom liked what it saw in United’s Bill Hamid during the 21-year-old goalkeeper’s recent workouts and could approach the MLS club at some point this winter about a transfer. Hamid doesn’t have enough U.S. national team experience to receive a British work permit, but as the No. 2 keeper behind Tim Howard this year, he has a case to be approved. Maybe one more year at United, max, unless he's hurt or regresses.
• It's December, and already dark forces are gathering. I hadn't thought of Glen Baxter in a couple of years.
• Yes, I've posted the Wright poem
• Karen O covers Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. Goodheh! Badheh!
• List of music blogs.
• Woke up with this in my head. Goodheh! Badheh!

THE CITY LIMITS

A.R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Should I Think Personally, Such as, This Week Seems to Have Been Crafted in Hell: What: Is Something Going On: Something Besides This Diddledeediddle Everyday Matter-of-Fact

Blegsylvania is still dying its slow geriatric death, and Blegsylvania, even in its more robust days, always slowed between Thanksgiving and Giftmas as it's slowing now, but this slowdown seems sadder, more exhausted, depressing, forlorn, feels like surrender to inevitabilites. Did anyone doubt how Occupy would - will - play out, does anyone doubt how shitful POTUS12 will look and sound and feel like as it readies the populace for POTUS16 and on and on? Yes, space travel is boring. Yes, I project my aargh across Blegsylvania, broadcast my resignation before late capitalism's inexorable track to all Blegsylvanians. Also, that stoplight, two, three times a day.

• Which isn't to suggest giving-up. 
• Who rules Oakland?
• Occupy, unions, NGOs and the peril of DC activism.
• Giving the people what they want.
• We're being heard, but who's listening?
• Occupy now part of the lexicon?
• What I was saying. And they pass on the price of the panopticon plus profit to you!
• Panopticon!
• The right way to engage.
• Grifter-on-grifter food-fight.
• Also, motherfucking Obama.
• Also, one motherfucking ambitious cracker.
• Also, motherfucking christers.
• Thank you for the Kind words.
• CCT!
• For the record, I want both Branko DeRossario and Dwayne Boskovic, I'm curious to see if it could work, cause I think it would.
• Unsurprisingly, predictably even, having written the paragraph above last night, I woke up with Mark Kozelek songs in my head.

CALLED INTO PLAY

A.R. Ammons

Fall fell:  so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to

find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look

down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say
mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is

behind what and what behind that, deep down
where the surface has lost its semblance: or

should I think personally, such as, this week
seems to have been crafted in hell: what: is

something going on: something besides this
diddledeediddle everyday matter-of-fact: I

could draw up an ancient memory which would
wipe this whole presence away: or I could fill

out my dreams with high syntheses turned into
concrete visionary forms: Lucre could lust

for Luster: bad angels could roar out of perdition
and kill the AIDS vaccine not quite

perfected yet: the gods could get down on 
each other; the big gods could fly in from

nebulae unknown: but I'm only me: I have 4
interests--money, poetry, sex, death: I guess

I can jostle those. . . .

Honor a Going Thing, Goldfinch, Corporation, Tree, Morality

Internet Addiction Test. Not in real life, not in blog life, almost certainly in wage life I'll soon need twitter, venders I monitor now updating status via. I promise not to tweet in real life or blog life. I've still not bought a iPad or tablet or smart phone. I briefly thought about it last week when Planet and I went to a Verizon store to swap out her phone; we were hard-shopped the latest iPhone, and when Planet said can I have one and I said yes (while thinking, Would I like an iPhone?) the salesperson said no, not now, you can reserve one for a week from Saturday, so while fuck that, I got out without one but get only half-credit for willpower.

• The pink arrow painted on the curb in front of my house months ago was to mark where a new tree was to be planted, yesterday, three years after MOCO took down the maple. I know nothing about trees: you plant trees two days before December?
• Cultural materialism and identity politics.
• The resurgence of the civic.
• Public opinion is irrelevant.
• Occupy's enthusiasm and contempt for democracy.
• Occupy's anarchist roots.
• Mobs through the looking glass.
• Fuckers.
• British strike. As Yves comments, funny how little play it's getting is US.
• The unreasonable Left.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Dr Goebbels, pick up the white courtesy phone.
• Also, motherfucking christers.
• Brownback cockroach.
• I was going to mock Ruth Marcus, but here's Greenwald.
• Things you might have missed.

• Quaranta - gone. My lasting memory - stopping at one of the two Houses on 95 north of Baltimore on way home from 2010 game in Philadelphia with Landru and Ilse, ten at night, Quaranta walks by, sees us in United garb, says hi.
• Barklage, Burch, Cronin, McTavish, Morsink, Ngwenya, Simms, Zayner.
• Robbie Russell.
• First home game March 10.
• Fire Dale Hunter!
• A.R. Ammons interview. I love Ammons.
• Fucked Up.
• Thanks to Hamster for sending me deathbed compositions, which reminded me of the Berg Violin Concerto.

MECHANISM

A.R. Ammons

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

          morality: any working order,

       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held

          to maintain the order in repair,

       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:

          honor the persisting reactor,

       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars

          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,

       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where

          flash vanishes into stillness,

       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,

          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies

       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed

          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into

       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the

          unique genes,

       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted

          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,

       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,

          territorial rights, mind rising

       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male

          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper

       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:

          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen

       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates

          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum

       efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and

          necessary worked out of random, reproducible,

       the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations

          that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a

       great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf. 

Planet Called Re: George

Planet called from Bamgier asking why I hadn't blogged today's tenth anniversary of George's passing. Noted. I expect the fuck me and my calendar comment toot sweet even if I needed reminding by my daughter. As for George, I need a bigger desert island or a less stupid game. Death to the either/or.





UPDATE! A loved one emails to say play this. Yes.

Evidence Suggests Eight Complexly Folded Scuttling Works of Armament

Sam Brownback apologized (of a sorts) after his asshole staff hammered an eighteen-year-old smart-ass tweeter, and ask yourself, in Kansas (or your state) politics, what is more dangerous to Brownback's permanent Senate seat than cyber-dissent by high school seniors?

UPDATE! He's governor of Kansas now? Last time I thought of him he was a senator and 2008 Republican primary's Santorum.

Blogbud Duncan wrote about the incident, and here I plagiarize the email I sent him in response to the post, his email to me, my email to him:

Me: Re: tweet - when I stop to think of the ways I voluntarily - thoughtlessly - like this email, for instance - enter evidence into panopticon's data base, that's when I recognize with a thump how complicit I am. They know I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday, or, rather, not know, have stored the data I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday in case they ever want to know. We buy products that help us be tracked, easier and easier with every upgrade, 4D today, 5D tomorrow.

Duncan: Y'know, though, "voluntarily" and "thoughtlessly" mean two different things.  Most people aren't aware that everything they do that involves a computer is trackable, and many wouldn't be happy if they realized it.  I'm reading a good book on ethics right now that mentioned something that's bothered me before, the tendency to assume that if I voluntarily do something now, I somehow accept its most distant consequences.  This is invoked very selectively, of course: if a woman has unprotected sex, she's supposedly 'choosing' to get pregnant; if she goes for a walk alone, she's supposedly 'choosing' to be raped.  But it's not applied to other people: if a bank CEO decides to deal in risky derivatives and causes lots of people to lose their homes, he's not said to have 'chosen' to be strung up from a lamppost by an angry mob; if a very high government official chooses to have captives waterboarded, he's not 'choosing' to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell in the Hague.  But even distinguished professional philosophers have made that false connection.

Me: Yes, you're right, re: voluntarily v thoughtlessly - I thought about this when we were in the UK (London especially) when everyone everywhere is under constant surveillance when on the streets, the tube, everywhere; it's not precisely voluntary (one has to go out) and thoughtlessly is both a strategy and an avoidance.

Adding: as for tweetguilt, blogguilt, emailguilt, cellguilt, I burst to fill Our Overlord's Dossier Against Me, so far they don't (and rightfully) give a flying fuck though I flatter myself they're listening. Hey! Bankers suck! Up against the wall, motherfuckers!

• Dare I say, E.J. Dionne's revolutionary manifesto. It will convince Joe Lieberman to stop being a self-serving dick.
• Here's the sublede of a Pastor Sanctimonious column up on the front webpage at YFWP as I type this at 830 PM EST 11/28/11: Romney’s new ad is misleading, but Obama can’t complain about distortions. That may or not be gone by the time you read this sentence. What won't be gone is this final sentence in Pastor Sanctimonious' sermon on good and evil, typed without a hint of irony or self-awareness: In political advertising, it is not impurity that rankles most. It is the pretense of purity. He's a B-List asshole by YFWP's exceptionally awful standards of assholosity, but he's a sanctimonious asshole Pastor Sanctimonious is.
• Occupy London at crossroads.
• Post-democracy.
• I'm convinced Corporate wants Obama to win.
• As nature allows.
• You are what you buy.
• Narrative is distorting. 
• Someone else's children.
• Blogbud JV emailed, recommends this and this for your consideration.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Hey, someone else thinks the new kits are lame.
• Hey, don't take tylenol.
• MOCO and big boxes. Hey, why are there no Sheetzs or WaWas in MOCO? I'm asking.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• Elkin.
• Musashi plain moon.
• Yes, I did do some tweeking of the blog. The WFMU widget crashed so it's been removed, I've moved Me and Mine higher on the left, and I've expanded Because Left to twenty-five showing at once instead of ten. 
• There are some new occupants in Because Left and Because Right. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, let me know.

A GREEN CRAB'S SHELL

Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Pressed, Printed, Stomped, Tripped; Trapped, Tricked, Packaged, Shipped...

Jeebusfuck, those are United's new clown suits kits for 2012. What the fuck are those red things on the arms of the home blacks, red collars and armpits on the white road shirt, I mean, fuck adidas, and remember, just because there's not a stupidass third red kit shown doesn't mean there won't be a stupidass third red kit next year.

Gah, I'll save you! save me! have another GbV song:

I Am This Dream's Dog

King Shit & The Golden Boys. I surrender, I don't know why it took till now, but Guided by Voices (all Pollard projects) is now officially the third permanent member of my Sillyass Desert Island Five, leaving only two rotating spots. Be in your head:

• Cheyenne.
• Unreasonable Liberals.
• Things I will keep.
• Kleptocracy and you.
• This shitty blog's Theme Song 3.
• The coming age of Neocla.
• My kind of soldier.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf, redux.....
• Echos Myron.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• I am an scientist.
• Misanthropy's holiday.
• I am a tree.
• Banana Republic.
• Bright paper werewolves.
• Rhetorical question.
• Dodging invisible rays.
• Miller time.
• How's my drinking?
• The attempt to write.
• Big school.
• Silliman's always astonishingly generous lit-links.
• Hey Aardvark.
• Under the influence of ideals.
• Closer you are.
• On classic rock.

DREAM IN WHICH I MEET MYSELF

Lynn Emanuel

Even the butter's a block of sleazy light. I see that first,
as though I am a dreary guest come to a dreary supper.
On her table, its scrubbed deal trim and lonely as a cot,
is food for one, and everything we've ever hated: a plate of pallid
grays and whites is succotash and chops are those dark shapes glaring up at us.
Are you going to eat this? I want to ask; she's at the stove dishing up,
wearing that apron black and stiff as burned bacon, reserved for maids and waitresses.
The dream tells us: She is still a servant. Even here.
So she has to clean our plate. It's horrible to watch.
She pokes the bits of stuff into her mouth. The roll's glued shut like a little box
with all that sticky butter. Is this all living gets you? The room, a gun stuck in your back?
Don't move, It says. She's at the bureau lining up bobby pins.
Worried and fed up I wander to the window
with its strict bang of blind. My eyes fidget and scratch.
And then I see myself: I am this dream's dog. I want out.

Complete, in Ignorance, New Combinations

End of the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania in a dying Blegsylvania, end of Planet's visit, she's back in Bamgier, end of Earthgirl's show, end of Earthgirl's paintings here*, end of Occupy - all Corporate had to do was wait for motherfucking Giftmas, let the motherfucking peasants pepper-spray each other over motherfucking game-boys, though punching fucking hippies was too much fun to resist. Meme the Davis cop onto motherfucking Rembrandt, peasants, see if Corporate cares, Black Friday sales up 7% over last year in a worse economy, revolution, you motherfucking indoctrinated motherfuckers, by which I mean me, out $175 on a pair of Vasque hiking boots with goretex against Ohio snow as an early Giftmas present for Planet.

• No, I don't think Occupy's dead, but I've been reminded of the improbability if not impossibility of its success however you wish to define it. Running some coats down this afternoon. Thanks! Neil and Tracy.
• Democracy v Plutocracy: The Chart.
• Rhetorical question.
• Canada too, and soon.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf.
• *UPDATE! Not never, just this show. You read monologues out loud, no? 
• Capitalism's side-effects.
• Like this will stop the U.S.
• They hate us for our freedoms and wholesome goodness.
• The good news at the end of the slowest week of the year in a dying Blegsylvania is not only did I not full bleggalgaze, I never came close to full bleggalgazing, nor wrote about what my not coming close to full bleggalgazing signifies, not even in tablet.
• General strike in England.
• A Daniel come to judgment.
• One of many problems with Ron Paul. 
• Also, is it my imagination or are all google products, blooger to gmail, clusterfucked recently re: loading? 
• Ten years ago I would have felt morally obligated to read new DeLillo.
• American Incognito.

THE ANNIHILATION OF NOTHING

Thom Gunn

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name

That nightly I rehearsed till led away

To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,

More space than space, over the cloud and slime,

Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,

Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,

And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire

Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,

Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided

Ultimate in its abstract devastations,

Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.

Only an infinite finitude I see

In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be

Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark

Of dread.

               Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.