Infinite Finitude

         
So I moused twice for WFMU this marathon, once early then once again when Yo La Tengo, for the eighteenth straight year, played three hours of requests in exchange for donations. I asked them to play their favorite Guided by Voices song (I am curious what it is) but they never got to it. No big deal, I think, they got hundreds of requests. Saturday, I get this email:

Hey Jeff,

   When we were cleaning up the mess we made of the Berlin studio at 5 pm German Standard Time, there was band-wide dismay when we uncovered your generous pledge that somehow was overlooked amid the chaos.  We all hope you'll accept our apology.  We hate to let any request go unacknowledged (that's why they invented medleys), and especially a Mouse.

Ira, Georgia and James

Love. Also love for WFMU, which made their goal. If you gave, thanks.

• Barbarian Rhapsody.
• State of Play, Spring 2013.
• Even Democratic loyalists?
• Of course it is. Something I debate: how often do I yodel the same point here? For instance, for all my bitching and moaning about the surveillance state, no one contributes more to my surveillance than me. I post on internet, I pay my bills on internet, I use a cell phone, my cell phone has a GPS.
• Cops are here to protect you, cont.
• On Steubenville and ruining promising lives.
• The assholes of CNN.
• Predators of the First Amendment.
• The point of intersection.
• The Litany Against Beers.
• Idea for a movie.
• His Generation's Greatest Academic Fraud writes soft-porn for Abercrombie & Fitch.
• Is Francis a fraud?
• I know nothing about the crisis is Cyprus. Here's Yves w/background.
• Capitalism, Fuckface Hiatt's rag, morality.
• Tactics for the revolution of everyday life.

• The New Inquiry's awesome Sunday link aggregation.
• The Honest Courtesan's awesome link aggregation.
• davidly's 500th post.
• Silver Line.
• Things I had forgotten: beets are yummy, especially roasted, and beets turn your piss pink.
• Anyone have an opinion on Feedly?
• On Philip Roth.
• The inscrutable brilliance of Anne Carson. I need investigate.
• Listen to Finnegan's Wake.
• Glück, for those of you who do.
• The letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer.
• Babbitt, for those of you who do.
• Randal's latest playlist.
• darkblack's Weekend Overnight.
• Mining the audio motherlode.

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.