United 4, Dallas 1

 

Hot damn. From unreasonable despair to unreasonable expectations in two weeks! Beautiful goals, is that too much to ask?





Hope the embed stays - in the past it stops working after a few hours. Gotta run, leaving for Ohio in minutes. Here's Fullback, here's Martin, here's some guy at Ive's, I'll post more and more links later, or not. Oh, DeLeon? I understand why, for now, Pontius is on the bench.

The Seriously Happy Heart Is a Problem

Somewhere I once read that March 30 is David Thomas' birthday but I can't find where. Wikipedia and other places list just March 1953, so regardless whether today is actually David Thomas' 59th birthday, today is a High Egoslavian Holiday. In my sillyass Desert Island Five game, all Thomas' projects, but especially Pere Ubu, have one of three permanent seats (yes, the Yo La Tengo petition I submitted to myself to make YLT  the fourth permanent member I rejected: nothing against YLT, I just want two rotational spots and I'm not kicking out Kate Bush or GbV/Pollard or Thomas). If you want lots of Pere Ubu/Thomas songs, use the search box up top, they're all over this shitty bleg. Hey, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?





It's true, and we have a date tonight, then tomorrow Earthgirl and I rent a car and drive to Bamgier to take Planet and three friends out to dinner at the only Four Star restaurant in the county! Sunday we take Planet into the greater Vount Mernon metroplex to shop for basics, then we're going to take a four hour drive together on roads I've never driven and yap and don't yap and take photos and don't. Once Planet tells us to go away, she has homework, we'll start driving to wherever it is we want to disc (me) and paint (Earthgirl): I rented a big enough car Earthgirl can bring all the canvases she wants and I'm bringing the red bag. We're thinking of Forked Run State Park, with a world class 24 hole course and scenic views perfect for landscape artists. Tuesday we drive back to Bamgier - on as many scenic green-dashed roads as time allows - and take Planet out to dinner one more time, then drive home Wednesday. I will not seek to beat my 5.5 hour drive of last time. Expect lots of photos, travel narrative, the stuff most people hate but is my favorite flavor (besides bleggalgazing, of which I am always bursting, but) of blegging.

• My fantasy of Rohn Joberts being hit by a bus so Obama need choose his replacement on a very pro-Corporate SCOTUS is not going to happen, no doubt to his deep relief if he thought about it.
• American rubes.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• Republican conservatism: an infantile disorder?
• You know, an increasing dislike and distrust of professional progressives IS NOT OFFSET by a lessening of contempt for American conservatives. In fact, each increases the loathing of the other. I know I keep saying this - hopefully less than the everyday I used to - but this is not a Corporate bug, it's a Corporate feature.
• Motherfucking hipster libertarians.
• Racism: not what it used to be.
• Reality you make, reality you don't.
• On a clear day.
• Peter Nowak: still a dick.
• Literature flowchart.
• On Harry Crews. Read a couple, understand why they sang to people even if they didn't sing to me, have friends who love him.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Harry Crews.
• On Earl Scruggs. See above comment about Crews, transcribe.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• Twenty-one love poems.
• Five poems.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• On Adrienne Rich.
• Yesterday's link to a Dustin Wong song reminded me of Ponytail (or, rather, reading about Dustin Wong, I discovered he was in Ponytail).
• This shitty bleg's Official Theme Song 2:

TROUBLE

Jack Gilbert

This is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico
raising peacocks for the rest of your life.
The seriously happy heart is a problem.
Not the easy excitement, but summer
in the Mediterranean mixed with
the rain and bitter cold of February
on the Riviera, everything on fire
in the violent winds. The pregnant heart
is driven to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world. Love is always
disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.
Eden can not manage so much ambition.
The kids ran from all over the piazza
yelling and pointing and jeering
at the young Saint Chrysostom
standing dazed in the church doorway
with the shining around his mouth
where the Madonna had kissed him.

His Head Smashed In and His Heart Cut Out and His Liver Removed and His Bowels Unplugged and His Nostrils Raped and His Bottom Burned Off and His Penis Split and His...

Hamster reminds me that Brave Sir Robin is 69 today.

Also, four song set that isn't but feels necessary.












.

I Came to See the Damage That Was Done and the Treasures That Prevail

I'm aware that one of the reasons Adrienne Rich's poetry works but doesn't sing to me, I said to L last night as we met for a drink: she's a polemicist using accusatory second person. So are you, L said. I know, I said, and it's not that Rich is a better poet than me, though obviously she is by universes, it's that I don't like to write using the accusatory second person, I can't help it, I fight it but can't help it, I'm a hector who likes hectoring too much (and have no cause to hector as Rich had cause to hector) and don't like being hectored. Yes, said L, that's why it was vitally important that Rich hectored you, hectored everyone, hectored the world. And then L told me stories about Adrienne Rich, her friend and colleague, stories general and personal, some of which I'd love to but can't tell you.

• Not kablooey but ka-ching.
• E Pluribus go F@#k yourself.
• Enemy sighted, enemy met.
• A short history of privatization in the UK.
• Is disorganization damaging Occupy?
• Professional progressive indicts professional conservatives.
• Get ready for Rubio-overload.
• Take it from white guys.
• Defending pink slime.
• Howard Street Tunnel.
• Social media explained.
• The politics and poems of Adrienne Rich.
• Adrienne Rich.
• Rich interview.
• The Court Composer of Kalamazoo. I have a listening assignment.

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

I Know You Are Reading This Poem as the Underground Train Loses Momentum and Before Running Up the Stairs Toward a New Kind of Love Your Life Has Never Allowed

Adrienne Rich has died. I enjoy and respect her poetry though I don't love it (though I love what she is saying) but I've dear and smart friends who deeply and profoundly do, and I recognize her importance not only in poetry but in many branches of theory (I don't know if it's still true, but when I was in grad school, Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience was - not by curricular rules, but by sense - required reading for any theory class).

FROM AN ATLAS OF A DIFFICULT WORLD

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your

hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I'll post obits and reflections as I see them. L, I'm sorry, love, see you soon.

UPDATE! Here.

Arrayed I Set Out, This Once Obedient, Toward the Hive's Domed Skeps On Evening's Hill

UPDATE! Yes, I've removed the eyeball that was here, considering...

• We're so exceptional: Law, after all, constrains power, and the United States, like any great power, is likely to support a law-bound international order only if it ties up the power of its competitors more than it constrains its own. Other great powers have subscribed to this realist calculus in advancing international law. America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country’s redemptive role in creating international order. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the US has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them, while seeking by hook or by crook to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application. From Nuremberg onward, no country has invested more in the development of international jurisdiction for atrocity crimes and no country has worked harder to make sure that the law it seeks for others does not apply to itself.
• Empire of innocents.
• On the above: selective morality.
• Yes, the one-post-a-month when the gif ban is lifted!
• Letter to a granddaughter. I haven't warbled this in months, but mine is the first generation in American mythology that has no illusions we're leaving the next generation a better America than was given us.
• Send Robert Reich an email, ask him, WTF?
• A Communist critique of the media.
• Thuggification.
• Conformity v obedience: As far as the difference between conformity and obedience goes, we can submit that Cordelia obeys, whereas the Regan and Goneril conform. Obedience in the realm of the social construct can cause us to be misunderstood, even censored. To obey the organic truth underlying principles is much more dangerous than conforming to their outward resemblance. Many great writers pay a price, not for being disobedient, but for being obedient to some necessity beyond mere conforming. To be a non-conformist in this sense means to obey the deeper truth and risk being mistaken as a rebel. Nothing is more perverse to the status quo than true obedience. Goodness doesn't need the status quo. Evil and mediocrity insist upon it.
• Waiting for Wotan, continued.
• This Is Entertainment, continued.
• New Paul Weller?

TELLING THE BEES

Deborah Digges

It fell to me to tell the bees,
though I had wanted another duty—
to be the scribbler at his death,
there chart the third day's quickening.
But fate said no, it falls to you
to tell the bees, the middle daughter.
So it was written at your birth.
I wanted to keep the fire, working
the constant arranging and shifting
of the coals blown flaring,
my cheeks flushed red,
my bed laid down before the fire,
myself anonymous among the strangers
there who'd come and go.
But destiny said no. It falls
to you to tell the bees, it said.
I wanted to be the one to wash his linens,
boiling the death-soiled sheets,
using the waters for my tea.
I might have been the one to seal
his solitude with mud and thatch and string,
the webs he parted every morning,
the hounds' hair combed from brushes,
the dust swept into piles with sparrows' feathers.
Who makes the laws that live
inside the brick and mortar of a name,
selects the seeds, garden or wild,
brings forth the foliage grown up around it
through drought or blight or blossom,
the honey darkening in the bitter years,
the combs like funeral lace or wedding veils
steeped in oak gall and rainwater,
sequined of rent wings.
And so arrayed I set out, this once
obedient, toward the hives' domed skeps
on evening's hill, five tombs alight.
I thought I heard the thrash and moaning
of confinement, beyond the century,
a calling across dreams,
as if asked to make haste just out of sleep.
I knelt and waited.
The voice that found me gave the news.
Up flew the bees toward his orchards.

Born Eighty-Six Years Ago Today

You Will Not Be This Quick to Redden Forever

• How to start a blog in 2012. I've never run google analytics on this bleg - I've friends who assure me, design-wise, ease of viewing-wise, this blog sucks. That's more than good enough for me.
• The above video is BLCKDGRD - Theme Song 9, or would be if motherfucking blogger let me add it to the Me and Mine blogroll.
• Derp.
• Prove you're not a slut.
• Shot for pot.
• Shot for pot.
• Graeber interview.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• That's the only either/or we're told we have.
• Divide and conquer.
• Pastor Sanctimonious scolds the crackers.
• MCPS ditching Pink Slime.
• Satie on nylon-string guitar.
• Hear some new Sigur Ros.

MARS BEING RED

Marvin Bell

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick to redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.

Born One Hundred Thirty-Four Years Ago Today

THE SILKEN TENT

Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Also too, Spock, in both universes, is 81 today. Holyfuck you're old.

I didn't feel like rolling on tacks then jumping into a vat of vinegar last night and I still don't today, so no links today though have this and this and this and this and

Answering the Challenge of Apocalyptic Times Even If This Meaning Sounds Apocalyptic

• Bartok was born 131 years ago today.
• I've not used the CWCF (Canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool) tag on myself as much as before when (a) I hadn't had my obamapostasies micro and macro yet and (b) I hadn't realized how long, slow, and routine the road to apocalypse is, mentioned because of this post's title and the realization that, for all my yodeling, I'm not CWCFing as much or as hard as I did when I had belief in Liberal progress and certainty of its failure (as opposed to no belief in Liberal progress and certainty of its failure). 
• Civil liberties, for instance.
• Breaking up with the Sierra Club, for instance.
• The shape of the future.
• Imperialist tactics.
• Three Villager models, reviewed by Villager.
• Greed is the beginning of everything.
• Lord Hee-Haw.
• In the blood.
• Fredric Jameson reviews the new Žižek: As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Žižek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. Žižek is, after all, his generation's greatest academic fraud. As always, I sincerely say that admiringly.
• The speeds of change.
• Bud Sasha sends me notice that yesterday was Ferlinghetti's 93rd birthday!

POETRY AS INSURGENT ART [I AM SIGNALING YOU THROUGH THE FLAMES]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

Vancouver 0, United 0

The thing about Boskovic - his contract is up in July. If Olsen/Kasper/Payne truly haven't already conceded he's a dry well, that no decision has been made whether to release or resign him, then, if he is fit (and he may not be - I think he probably isn't - full match fit), play him from start to finish and give him a chance to find his form. I suspect O/K/P have already conceded Boskovic is a dry well (and if he is a dry well, well, who signed him, hmmm?), that Boskovic's style isn't rugged enough for MLS thuggishness (he's easily dispossessed with a shove, his dig on defense isn't enough), that his work rate isn't Olsenian-enough, but Boskovic shows flashes of class that suggest with time on the field he could produce as a DP should. If/when this fails, I'll always remember Steve Fucking Nicol ordering his players to cripple Boskovic at the US Open Cup game in Germantown last summer just as Boskovic was rounding into form - we'll never know what would have happened if Ningland hadn't deliberately taken out Branko's knee for nine months.

Yes, yes, yes, marked improvement last night v Vancouver than the prior two weeks against vastly superior teams. The marking was stronger, the defense kept its shape and head, and the second half, in which St Benny of Olsen introduced both Pontius and Boskovic, was easily the best 45 minutes of offense this season, and United was clearly the better side. More importantly, enough improvement and result to brake the panic had United shown poorly - Goff tweeted a sarcastic reply to a twoot suggesting Benny be fired. We all wonder at Benny's selections. Had United been 3-0ed last night, I can imagine the yodeling in this and other corners. Two home games next, Friday against the Burn and the following Saturday against Seattle, two quality teams. Had United been 3-0ed last night, the prospect of an 0-5 season start (as opposed to a still very possible 0-1-4 start) would have loomed as almost probable. So a shitty point last night which, depending on how it plays, might in retrospect be remembered as the most important of the season. Or not.