Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Catnip to a Brat Placated by Model Airplane Kits Kids My Size Lack Motorskills For




  • Exactly.
  • I suppose there are updates on the latest intramural food fight on King of Anarchists.
  • I would ask those happy-dancing the defeat of Eric Cantor (the ridiculous Joan Walsh, for instance) to consider... 
  • Today will be especially slow for us littles in Blegsylvania as people flock to Bleggal Overlords to read Brat-slamming, Brat-baiting, Brat-debate, Brat-analysis, be told what to Brat-think.
  • Dear Overlord, of course Brat is a rightwing asshole.
  • The true aims of the War on TerrorNow those who remember what the world was like before the Second World War -- the ugly, despairing poverty and inequality that Smith writes about so movingly -- are almost gone. Even those of us who remember when the idea of human betterment seemed a realistic possibility for society, a practical goal to be pursued despite many difficulties, not a pipe dream scorned by the "savvy," are fading away. There are now generations well into adulthood who have never known anything but the war principle and the neoliberal ascendancy as "normality," the natural state of things. Indeed, in a very few years, we'll see the first generation of adults who will have lived their entire lives under the reign of the Terror War. The relentless assault of the elites who have thrived under the war principle, increasing the unequal proportion of their wealth and power to unimaginable levels, have left these new generations very little to build upon. On so many fronts, so many levels, they will essentially have to start from scratch, re-discover old skills and insights that have been lost, re-fight old battles,  and of course, create new ways of trying to go forward (like the Occupy movement).
  • I live in Maryland's 8th Congressional District. Gerrymander much?
  • I have not seen a single sign from a Democratic challenger to Chris Van Hollen in the upcoming primary in which I will not vote (except if Earthgirl asks me to vote for certain people for Board of Education, she being a MCPS teacher).






  • World Cup opinionsPolitics, geography and good old schadenfreude seem to play a strong role in rooting. A plurality of Mexican respondents named the United States as their least-favorite team. Brazilians chose Argentines, and vice versa. Greeks named their bankers: both Germany and the United States.
  • Food links.
  • Jeebus, blooger is extra-skeevy today.
  • sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously....
  • Houllebecq, for those of you who do.
  • New thing elsewhere, for the few of you who do.
  • Reading, the struggleNow, on the contrary, every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that I was doing most of my reading on my two or three weekly train commutes to Milan, two hours there, two hours back. Later, with better laptop batteries and the advent of mobile Internet connections, that space too was threatened. The mind, or at least my mind, is overwhelmingly inclined toward communication or, if that is too grand a word, to the back and forth of contact with others. It's true, beloveds, it's your fault I'm not finishing novels.







THE CLOSET

Bill Knott

(...after my Mother's death)

Here not long enough after the hospital happened   
I find her closet lying empty and stop my play   
And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers   
Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy

Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence   
Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out   
Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be   
Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be

Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri   
But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re
Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their   
Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards

Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!—
As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where   
Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled   
At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can

I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the   
Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only   
The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this   
Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings

Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip,   
Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly
Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric   
God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip

To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids
My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed,   
Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as
Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows,

Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within   
To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream   
Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating-
Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack,

Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical   
Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing
And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead   
Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted

Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked   
Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back,   
Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if
He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ...

Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump   
Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear,   
Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air   
Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here

By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.



4 comments:

  1. true aims of the war on terror - chris floyd tends to take a rather moralistic stance on things like this - i like it, actually

    primary election - missus charley and self have had the privilege of being in three different congressional districts since we moved into the house we have now - we intend to vote to express our preferences in the governor and county executive races



    ReplyDelete
  2. I would ask those happy-dancing the defeat of Eric Cantor (the ridiculous Joan Walsh, for instance) to consider...

    Nope.

    1) Watching Jenghazi (who just last week proclaimed the Tea Party daid), is too much fun.

    2) It was really about immigration. Brat won by appealing to the racist GOP base.

    3) Without schaden freude, we'd have no freude at all.
    ~

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My freude just doesn't schaden like it used to.

      Delete
    2. I will revise and extend my remarks.

      It's immigration that Brat ran on, but there's more to the story than just this guy who came out of nowhere.
      ~

      Delete