Objects of Value or Virtue, However, Are Also to Be Picked Up Here, Though Rarely, Lying with Bones and Rotten Meat, Eggshells and Mouldy Bread, Banana Peels No One Will Skid On, Apple Cores That Caused Neither the Fall of Man nor a Theory of Gravitation

• Did you know the University of Maryland at College Park is located in that shithouse of The Eastern Shore? It's true! And while I can't summon a damn about Terpistan basketball anymore, it's still rewarding to delight in Duke losing. And no, I don't know if the allusion to Big D's Underground Man was intentional.
• Facepalmistry. 
• Brand new products.
• Cosmetics as police regime. 
• Which is shittier: that Obama wants to gut the New Deal because he is enthralled to his handlers or that he wants to gut the New Deal because of his legacy?
• Total Information Awareness.
• Object-Oriented-Whatevery. (h/t) Word.
• World's Dumbest Public Intellectual! Whew.
• Someone I know who knows Jennifer Rubin says Rubin is genuinely batshit crazy, scream at the neighbors batshit crazy.
• My state does a good thing.
• Blogbud Brad tweeted last night It's amazing how suddenly visible to the world one becomes to the world when carrying a copy of Moby-Dick. and I replied, Depending on what copy it is (I have one of those wonderful tiny old B&N Moby Dick in red cloth), I think people think it's >>>> it's a Bible, it's interesting to get the looks I probably used to give, the looks of those who hope it's a Bible.
• Althusser, for those of you who do.
• HEY! United v Fucking Metros on NBC at 12:30 EDT today. Watch!
• New Murakami novel! It's called  色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年.
• Anthony's litlinks.
• Hey, JCO has a new novel out. It's been awhile since I read her, this one sounds interesting (from what I've seen beyond the Stephen King review that's linked), plus she's fun on twitter.
• Untitled.
• The Thinning.
• Hey, throw WFMU the coins in your pocket please. Listened to Pseu last night, surely a coincidence she played the same Sparks song that is one of two of this shitty blog's March 2013 Theme Songs, but here's what's surprising - she played a Fleet Foxes song that didn't suck. What Fleet Foxes I had heard were the same three dreadful songs on Hipster KEXP. Not going to seek out more, not going to post here, but I heard a Fleet Foxes song that didn't suck.
• Here, because I love you:

THE TOWN DUMP

Howard Nemerov

A mile out in the marshes, under a sky

Which seems to be always going away

In a hurry, on that Venetian land threaded

With hidden canals, you will find the city

Which seconds ours (so cemeteries, too,

Reflect a town from hillsides out of town),

Where Being most Becomingly ends up

Becoming some more. From cardboard tenements,

Windowed with cellophane, or simply tenting

In paper bags, the angry mackerel eyes

Glare at you out of stove-in, sunken heads

Far from the sea; the lobster, also, lifts

An empty claw in his most minatory

Of gestures; oyster, crab, and mussel shells

Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled

Away at the gate of hell. If you want results,

These are results.

                          Objects of value or virtue,

However, are also to be picked up here,

Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,

Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels

No one will skid on, apple cores that caused

Neither the fall of man nor a theory

Of gravitation. People do throw out

The family pearls by accident, sometimes,

Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques

To prowl this place by night, with flashlights, on

The off-chance of somebody’s having left

Derelict chairs which will turn out to be

by Hepplewhite, a perfect set of six

Going to show, I guess, that in any sty

Someone’s heaven may open and shower down

Riches responsive to the right dream; though

It is a small chance, certainly, that sends

The ghostly dealer, heavy with fly-netting

Over his head, across these hills in darkness,

Stumbling in cut-glass goblets, lacquered cups,

And other products of his dreamy midden

Penciled with light and guarded by the flies.

For there are flies, of course. A dynamo

Composed, by thousands, of our ancient black

Retainers, hums here day and night, steady

As someone telling beads, the hum becoming

A high whine at any disturbance; then,

Settled again, they shine under the sun

Like oil-drops, or are invisible as night,

By night.

             All this continually smoulders,

Crackles, and smokes with mostly invisible fires

Which, working deep, rarely flash out and flare,

And never finish. Nothing finishes;

The flies, feeling the heat, keep on the move.

Among the flies, the purefying fires,

The hunters by night, acquainted with the art

Of our necessities, and the new deposits

That each day wastes with treasure, you may say

There should be ratios. You may sum up

The results, if you want results. But I will add

That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies,

Assemble in some numbers here, their wings

Shining with light, their flight enviably free,

Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange.

Vigilant Bears of Insecurity and Jealousy Padded Hungrily Behind His Eyes Each Night

Jack Applebaum and his running mate, Maggie Cleary, pose in Lauinger Library in front of their campaign poster when the two-week campaign period began.
      

• That's the caption beneath that photo in today's WaPo's story about a secret society at Illtophay, like I don't belong to and am excluded from secret societies with and from myself, and um, NO! that's the Intercultural Center, Red Square, morons. And they are standing outside, not inside.
• The banality of evil revisited.
• On an effective macroethics.
• Progressive movement as PR-front for rich Democrats.
• Today in Motherfucking Obama.
• Oh, this too.
• The government is engineering cyborg spy animals.
• MOCO is not like the rest of most of America.
• Um, oops, this was going to posted tomorrow, but a once every other month brain fart - I thought I had saved it to publish tomorrow morning, because...
• Lectures Mary Ruefle will never give.
• I haven't read Brian Moore in twenty years. Maybe I should.
• ... believe me, posting mid-afternoon on a Friday is not the best time to draw eyes.
• The savage wit of Mark E Smith.
• The boy with the spirograph eyes.
• The man with the child in his eyes.

KEAT'S PHRASE

Albert Goldbarth

My father’s been dead for thirty years

but when he appears behind my shoulder

offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride

in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown

or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world

—“Albie, grip in the middle and turn

with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable,

if not the way the wind is in a sock,

or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way

an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him

with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,

alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets

and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative

capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s,

from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times

a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian

version of early maritime cartography: the known world

stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes

Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates

their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath

with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste

on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think

of a polar bear!”...the game one plays

with a child. But I say with adult certainty that

when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping

he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet

those empty hours in his mind were populated just

as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there

were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears

of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind

his eyes each night until her return. For Keats,

however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is

a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable

“dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency

or sugar daddy powering the universe in all

its spangled beauty and veiled mystery

from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us

were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf.

“Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time

to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with

his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said

“I tried to support it by not going in.”

Sometimes, Not Often but Repeatedly, the Past Invades My Dreams in the Form of a Familiar Neighborhood I Can No Longer Locate

• Sure, easy. It wasn't the first thing you thought of?
• Blegsylvania fascinates me (you may have noticed), looking at the blegrells at 6:30 this morning, saw how many blegs had not updated since the announcement of the new pope. I admit, I too have no impression of the new pope beyond my lack of surprise he's against abortion and gay marriage and supports the continuance of celibacy and the all male clergy, but my point here is that, after ten years of doing this shit, I'm still counter-intuitively amazed that big news events quiet Blegsylvania rather than shake it like a hive.
• Progressive bleggal overlords discuss the A-List.
• Google Reader - the soon to be dead, Google insisted I acknowledge, Google Reader - was emptier than normal too this morning.
• Poll: over/under date Google kills Blooger. July 1, 2014 is my guess.
• Neoliberalism's theater of cruelty.
• Police state.
• Of course it is.
• The character assassination of Bradley Manning by NYT.
• The Re-Yodeling: John Podesta, Clinton henchman, calls on Obama to be open about drones, and you know what, eventually Obama will pass on whatever documentation necessary to end the kabuki over drones, the idea that POTUS can kill anyone anywhere for any reason at anytime by any means will be routinized though anesthetized by the salve that if it's by drone senior Democrats need tsk-tsk before approving.
• A preliminary sketch of a thesis on what it means to be Midwestern.
• Wittgenstein, for those of you who do.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• Borges' Aleph.
• The Third Hour of the Night.
• Scelsi's Hurqualia one, two, three, four.
• Fell asleep listening to Scelsi, woke up thinking of Scelsi.

NIGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

Campbell McGrath

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts, which include magic spells that enable the soul to be sewn in the body of the great mother, Nut, literally "night," like the seed of a plant, which is also a jewel and a star. The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian "Field of Rushes," the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

—Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey
    

1

Gravel paths on hillsides amid moon-drawn vineyards,

click of pearls upon a polished nightstand

soft as rainwater, self-minded stars, oboe music

distant as the grinding of icebergs against the hull

of the self and the soul in the darkness

chanting to the ecstatic chance of existence.

Deep is the water and long is the moonlight

inscribing addresses in quicksilver ink,

building the staircase a lover forever pauses upon.

Deep is the darkness and long is the night,

solid the water and liquid the light. How strange

that they arrive at all, nights on planet earth.

2

Sometimes, not often but repeatedly, the past invades my dreams in the form of a familiar neighborhood I can no longer locate,

a warren of streets lined with dark cafés and unforgettable bars, a place where I can sing by heart every song on every jukebox,

a city that feels the way the skin of an octopus looks pulse-changing from color to color, laminar and fluid and electric,

a city of shadow-draped churches, of busses on dim avenues, or riverlights, or canyonlands, but always a city, and wonderful, and lost.

Sometimes it resembles Amsterdam, students from the ballet school like fanciful gazelles shooting pool in pink tights and soft, shapeless sweaters,

or Madrid at 4AM, arguing the 18th Brumaire with angry Marxists, or Manhattan when the snowfall crowns every trash-can king of its Bowery stoop,

or Chicago, or Dublin, or some ideal city of the imagination, as in a movie you can neither remember entirely nor completely forget,

barracuda-faced men drinking sake like yakuza in a Harukami novel, women sipping champagne or arrack, the rattle of beaded curtains in the back,

the necklaces of Christmas lights reflected in raindrops on windows, the taste of peanuts and their shells crushed to powder underfoot,

always real, always elusive, always a city, and wonderful, and lost. All night I wander alone, searching in vain for the irretrievable.

3

In the night I will drink from a cup of ashes and yellow paint.

In the night I will gossip with the clouds and grow strong.

In the night I will cross rooftops to watch the sea tremble in a dream.

In the night I will assemble my army of golden carpenter ants.

In the night I will walk the towpath among satellites and cosmic dust.

In the night I will cry to the roots of potted plants in empty offices.

In the night I will gather the feathers of pigeons in a honey jar.

In the night I will become an infant before your flag.

Most Popes Are Called "Babe" Because Growing Up to Be Pope Is a Lot of Fun

 

HOW THE POPE IS CHOSEN

James Tate

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy.
Almost always a toy is an imitation
of something grown-ups use.
Popes with unclipped hair are called “corded popes.”
If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked,
it becomes extremely long and twists
into long strands that look like ropes.
When it is shorter it is tightly curled.
Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
“He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,”
but I won’t. After a poodle dies
all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven.
They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up
and then he’s the new Pope.
He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone,
day and night in all kinds of weather.
The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope,
like “Wild Bill” or “Buffalo Bill.”
He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front.
Most Popes are called “Babe” because
growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.
All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,
but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy.
They have to go to the bathroom by themselves,
and they spend almost all of their time sleeping.
Parents seem incapable of helping their little popes grow up.
Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows,
but the sky is full of them.
It looks as if they are just taking it easy,
but they are learning something else.
What, we don’t know, because we are not like them.
We can’t even dress like them.
We are like red bugs or mites compared to them.
We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper,
but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands.
We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes.
When a Pope is ready to come into the world,
we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well.
Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us.
They open their mouths at regular intervals.
They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross
and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips.
Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream
and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection
when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush
in search of a sheep.

• What the hell is wrong with me, why did it take me until 5:56 this morning to remember Tate's pope-poem? My apologies. 
• My apologies, I need point out again that when Obama is confronted (their word) w/questions about drones, especially by Democrats, weigh what's worse, they know it's kabuki, they think it's not kabuki?
• Trick question: insert whatever question behind that freaky backward E-thing of power and under that skeevy square root thing of greed and fuck me, your motives can be - probably are - purer than mine and thus more concussive than a depth charge dropped from PT-73.
• My apologies, after Get Smart and F Troop allusions yesterday, I thought a McCale's Navy allusion was necessary today, Old Leadbottoms.
• My apologies, this was going to be an aarghfree post.
• the moon gazed  my midnight labors...
• Taco Cat is a palindrome.
• Hey, look what was waiting for me when I got home last night:

• Arsenal line-up for tonight: Fabianski, Jenks, a mop, dust, Gibbs, dark matter, no tomato, inanimate carbon rod, Bergerac, Akers, a merkin.
• Devotion of rubes.
• Hey, if you listen to WFMU and/or appreciate what they do for music, they are way behind on their goals for the annual Marathon, throw them even a Snacks Sticker Sheet's worth of $$$ please. Look how much Arvo Pärt they play!
• Will there be a WFMU in 2046, when Planet is my age today, when I'm 85, when this fucking blog is 42, imagine how old the gags you hate now will be then.
• The ten least hipster cities.
• Baltasound.
• Bailter Space.
• A guide to Arvo Pärt's music.
• bX-62m038 - that's what motherfucking blooger told me after it ate this post last night - the part written before I remembered the Tate poem this morning - keeps telling me up to three minutes ago. What is an idiot blogwhore and attention slut to do?
• I had two interesting conversations blog-sparked yesterday, sincere thanks to you both, one - hehful - by phone, say no more say no more, the second by email, asking me to clarify one of my habitual spasms, not the following one, but related to Have I ever mentioned I love in this case Arvo Pärt's music? Because I do love Arvo Pärt's music, I mention it, play it all the time. Usually in this situation I would use the italicized question above as a brick in a gag lamely rhetorical to you perhaps but sophisticated as an anchor link to echoes to me, but not this time, just like this time.

It Was When the Catfish Were the Only Fish Left Living in the Monongahela River

One of my earliest crushes, my avatar's nemesis' partner, lover, mother of his twin children, code name Barbara Feldon, real name 99, was born 81 years ago today, oh my. I'd be curious how much Mel Brooks and Buck Henry say they consciously stole from and lovingly parodied the two Emma Peel Avenger years, at least 99 the first few seasons of Get Smart, but learning would entail research, and fuck that.

• Max quick, I'm weakening, dang, me never Max. One of my great sadnesses is that my avatar called in sick and was unavailable for this scene and Brooks and Henry had to bring in Corporal Agarn from Fort Courage Kansas, get him out of his Union blues and into my avatar's costume, had my avatar been there instead of crashed on mushrooms and Mad Dog it would make a far better, far sexier youtube than this one for 99's birthday.
• Canned laughter.
• Not the end of times but the end of time: We went from a future focused society to a present-based one. The leaning forward that had characterized our civilization since the invention of farming and text became more of a standing-up. I think this another facet of shock doctrine, this one more towards our conditioning for control by our owners rather than harvesting us for meat - America is still ten years behind Britain, twenty years behind Spain, thirty years behind Greece - but it reminds that because I got sick of saying and assumed long-timers were sick of hearing it I haven't been yodeling recently that the core of my rubiness is that until the past decade I believed unto a faith that in America each generation leaves the next generation a better America than the parenting generation was bequeathed. Cue violins for my daughter's future, it's an old and melodramatic gag, but what world will she live in when she's my age in 2046?
• Canned laughter.
• Life is cheap in the New World Order.
• Fucking Americans.
• Zizek on Chavez.
• One more idiot with a twitter account.
• So it seems I'm back to bullets, fucking blooger, it's the only fucking thing here it will let me change. If enough of you stop reading I can crash this and start start again elsewhere happily bitter at my involuntarily invisibility. Fuck me.
• Chance is a good librarian.
• What makes dogs dogs?
• A young William Carlos Williams writes a letter to his brother.
• OK, for MOCOMOFOs: a friend just tweeted that Bret Michaels (who the fuck is Bret Michaels?) likes curly fries. Ken Beatrice doesn't like curly fries, though he's told they're very good. Try the Jamocha Shake.
• At Matanaka Farm.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Roth, for those of you who do.
• Jim's latest playlist.
• I don't play enough Morton Feldman here.
• Holyfuck, forgive me, I love this below, this is the direction my ears are sprinting, I'm so stupid for it I can't believe you're not stupid for it too. Fine metaphors abound.

FATHER, IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

Milk Belongs to the Mythology of Cats But It Makes Them Sick

I wrote a rant after my encounter with my Obamapologist friend Friday after he accused me of indifference to, among many things, women's rights (I am willing to sacrifice my daughter's rights over her uterus, don't you know) because of my "fixation" with Obama's claims of power and the ever expanding police state. Fixation was his word; I accept it. I chose - and still choose - not to post the rant, though I offer these two thoughts: people of good will can disagree: if I prioritize A over B that does not necessarily mean I would willingly sacrifice women's rights nor does it mean if you prioritize B over A it necessarily means you support the King's imperial claims he can fucking well kill whomever whenever (in which case you're John Yoo, don't you know), and second, a new danger on the horizon:

     It's a herd of feral hamsters, a major herd, thundering across the yellow plains of the southern reaches of the Great Concavity in what used to be Vermont, raising dust that forms a uremic-hued cloud with somatic shapes interpretable from as far away as Boston and Montreal. The herd is descended from two domestic hamsters set free by a Watertown NY boy at the beginning of the Experialist migration in the subsidized Year of the Whopper. The boy now attends college in Champaign IL and has forgotten that his hamsters were named Ward and June.

     The noise of the herd is tornadic, locomotival. The expression on the hamsters' whiskered faces is businesslike and implacable - it's that implacable-herd expression. They thunder eastward across pedalferrous terrain that today is fallow, denuded. To the east, dimmed by the fulvous cloud the hamsters send up, is the vivid verdant ragged outline of the annularly overfertilized forests of what used to be Maine.

     With respect to a herd of this size, please exercise the sort of common sense that come to think of it would keep your thinking man out of the southwest Concavity anyway. Feral hamsters are not pets. They mean business. Wide berth advised. Carry nothing even remotely vegatablish if the path of a feral herd. If in the path of such a herd, move quickly and calmly in a direction perpendicular to their own.

• That's from Infinite Jest, this my fourth time through, IT'S WORKING! praise Baal, and also both a cheap gag for my amusement plus a thanks to Hamster for the Ornette Coleman cascade the other day, people dig it.
• The Cassandra Complex. Remember when I CWCFed?
• Of surveillance and scholarship.
• Surveillance culture.
• Not that I'm going to stop hectoring, I do think B depends on A more than A depends on B.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Three Democratic myths used to demean the Paul filibuster.
• The seven worse reactions to Paul's filibuster. I must have been number eight.
• The submissive, indifferent Democrats.
• donkey pyramid scheme.
• Fifteen ways the War on Drugs benefits the state.
• On questioning the Jewish state.
• In post-post-racial America.
• What was neo-liberalism?
• Anatomy and dissection.
• Expert bullshitters.
• Dozens of good links.

• All youtubes in this post pulled from WFMU programming, it's their annual marathon, throw them the coins in your pocket, please.
• A possum entering the argument.
• The Iowa Secret Conviviality Society.
• An argument.
• Work is the force that gives us meaning.
• The argument.
• Maryland, of, by, and for Lockheed Martin.
• Argument over, accounting.
• Becoming a heroine.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• I know the sequence of sponsored years in Infinite Jest so I don't need to refer to the listing DFW finally provides on page 233, though the dog-eared bookmark falls open to the page when I set down the book.
• Lispector, for those of you who do.
• The literary stock market. Fuck it.
• MP3 of Beckett's Embers, for those of you who do.
• Airport posted a playlist.
• Stockhausen.

[REASON LOOKS FOR TWO, THEN ARRANGES IT FROM THERE]

Lyn Hejinian

Reason looks for        Where I woke and was awake, in the
two, then                  room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I
arranges it                had my desk and thus my corner.
from there                While waiting, waltz. The soles of
                               our boots wear thin, but the soles of
                               our feet grow thick. The difference
                               between “he presented his argument”   
and “they had an argument.”   I still respond to the academic
year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn-
ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from
the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the
mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning
breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in
the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a
bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct
shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the
gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument”   is the
plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back
later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who
“love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones.
Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread
her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends
beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For,
as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the
same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight
I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a
knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of
ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had
first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt
just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning
unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to
sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The
piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m
not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on
trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was
a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap-
peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a
contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome
woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles
more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They
were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go
away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We
were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on
phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the
mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray
with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill
the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to
peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a
raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t,
after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the
compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my
determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the
range and degree of difference between things of one day and
things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx.
Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes
tracks.

United 1, Salt Lake 0

I'm so hopelessly a happy rube. We got two fewer games this year in our season ticket package - and has anyone seen anyone bitch about his, heard anyone bitch about this? For a decade we got three Special Game tickets in addition to the MLS regular season home games, this season we get ONE. And United moved the games from 7:30 to 7:00, stealing a half hour of my daylight. AND THE BEER SELECTION STILL SUCKS! I had a blast.
 

Here, can you see me in the photo below? See the star on the right, then the aisle to the right of that? Me and SeatSix are the two reds in the top red line directly above the line where the orange sign meets the black MLS sign.

Oh, the game. Perhaps United will be prettier when DeRossario returns next week from suspension, but St Benny of Olsen doesn't mind playing grind, and grind is OK as long as United wins.