Dig Me a Chamber of Preparedness

Woke up with that in my head.

Also too, Berger was on for three hours yesterday. For decades I wouldn't listen to music I pejoratively labeled Death Metal and dismissed as shitty, what a dumb motherfucker, fine metaphors abound. Suggestions solicited. I'd ask Randal but he's passed out from huffing group study room dry-ink markers to ease the strain of uckingfay acultyfay blaming Randal for the uckingfay actultyfay's library ineptitude and their consequent privileged rage and is sleeping it off in an outside book-bin.

• Learning how to die in the Anthropocene.
• James Scott reviews Jared Diamond: It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live. The malaise is all the more remarkable when the culture in question is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. 
• Sensing war.
• The difference between riots and demonstrations.
• What Lambert says. And Earthgirl has had her obamapostasy completely without my assistance, I haven't been talking about the clusterfuck in real life, not just not here. Even my Hilltop obamaphile friend and staunch Obama defender who doesn't want a nom-de-blog (and dude, Hilltop obamaphile friend and staunch Obama defender is a nom-de-blog, and a fucking long one) is edging towards his. Mind, for both, it's the incompetence driving the apostasy.
• Mass surveillance: not just the NSA. 
• All across America, spit takes. And Weldon's alive!
• Zadie Smith's review of Knausgaard and Tao Lin reminds me why I don't can't won't read any of the three of them, he says truthfully but gratuitously and snarkily.
• Wrapped in cellophane. 
• Today's poem by Susan Wheeler. It's not love yet but infatuation seems unavoidable.
• Bill Callahan profile and interview.
• Below the poem Anna Calvi, it's not love yet but infatuation seems unavoidable.
• Plumptuous flustration.
• Hejinian!
• Was reminded of both the top and below pieces by Donna's Gateway to Joy, I listened to this show a month of so ago, woke up with the above though she actually segued from the Kubisch/Plessi into the Hodell. If you like the music I've been listening too lately I strongly recommend working your way through Donna's playlists.

ALPHABET'S END

Susan Wheeler

So I'll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked,

planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery

before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia's

bewildered look before her pink slip came in the flimsy institution.

In the videos of C, a jejune overwhelmed the cast.

D built dollhouses. Even Lonnie down at Shell

found him less a man for it, the night they went off to see the stock

cars break. I wanted E's hair, but by the end it was no more. F

refused alms, pulling the man up by his shirt in the street, and

G sought rewards. Marybeth said H fondled her for sport.

Now you, I, Smokey, hell

bent on a village version of Club 21, embarrassed by our attentions.

Mistrust it was. Dig me a chamber of preparedness.