His Picket Teeth, These Left Their Mark but Never Did Explain the Joke That So Amused Him

United won. I didn't go. I've been to one game this year. I can't imagine going again. I'm glad United is having a wildly successful year so that I know it's not suckful soccer that's killed United for me. That was the main reason I bought season tickets this year, so suckful was the soccer last year I couldn't be sure my damnlessness wasn't tainted by the suck. I had a pang of failure last night when someone tweeted that United had scored. It quickly passed. I'll not buy season tickets next year. Beyond all the nitpicky complaints I have against DC United the business - and FUCK YOU UNITED FOR CHANGING THE GAME TIME TO 7:00 FROM 7:30!, I want that half hour before the game, it's useless to me after - here is the sentence that needs typing so I don't need to keep thinking about typing it: I don't want to dress in uniform and stand and chant and scream for mercenaries as ludicrous mimicry and reinforcement of tribal patriotic loyalty any more. Evoking two mainstay gags: (1) No one asks me how I separate my soccer and politics anymore, and (2) fine metaphors abound.

• Some links from friends and others while they are fresh:
• A prophet of HaShem whose name was Oded: on Gaza.
• Democracy DOA: On Gaza.
• Going down in infamy: On Gaza.
• Posted before, but.... Mowing the lawn: On Gaza.
• The logic of Israeli violence.
• Motherfucking Americans. Remind me, which is the client state?
• Disgrace: What of the broader ‘international community’, in other words the United States/EU/Nato? They have backed Israel. As for the ideologues of the human rights industry, Samantha Power, the queen of ‘humanitarian interventions’, is the US rep on the Security Council and staunchly pro-Israel. Both the House and the Senate have unanimously written Israel a blank cheque; the French Socialist government banned demonstrations against the Gaza horrors in Paris on the grounds that they would encourage anti-semitism (not well received by French Jewish organisations who co-sponsored the march); the British Foreign Office is compliant as usual; the Germans too busy imposing sanctions against Russia while turning a blind eye to Gaza and refusing to accept that the Palestinians are the indirect victims of the judeocide the Third Reich unleashed during the Second World War and for which successive democratic governments in Germany have been paying ever since. The US satellite states in Eastern Europe have followed suit.
• Frances wins an assault vehicle in the lottery!
• Everything I love exists only in my mind.
• A twitter conversation about William Tyler led to a kind person recommending Hiss Golden Messenger to me.
• Which makes me think Hiss Shitty Mallenger. It has to do with Yale. Consider this a late birthday present, the one of you who gets this.
• aphra natley's pictures and the space therein.
• Whiffle Street.
• Shadows of a Thousand Years.
• Hamster sends along this Kate Bush Saturday Night Live clip.
• He also sends this, a video guide to live Kate Bush performances.

THE GOOSE FISH

Howard Nemerov

On the long shore, lit by the moon   

To show them properly alone,   

Two lovers suddenly embraced   

So that their shadows were as one.   

The ordinary night was graced

For them by the swift tide of blood   

That silently they took at flood,   

And for a little time they prized

   Themselves emparadised.

Then, as if shaken by stage-fright   

Beneath the hard moon’s bony light,   

They stood together on the sand   

Embarrassed in each other’s sight   

But still conspiring hand in hand,   

Until they saw, there underfoot,

As though the world had found them out,   

The goose fish turning up, though dead,

   His hugely grinning head.

There in the china light he lay,   

Most ancient and corrupt and grey.   

They hesitated at his smile,

Wondering what it seemed to say

To lovers who a little while

Before had thought to understand,   

By violence upon the sand,

The only way that could be known   

   To make a world their own.

It was a wide and moony grin

Together peaceful and obscene;

They knew not what he would express,   

So finished a comedian

He might mean failure or success,   

But took it for an emblem of

Their sudden, new and guilty love

To be observed by, when they kissed,   

   That rigid optimist.

So he became their patriarch,

Dreadfully mild in the half-dark.

His throat that the sand seemed to choke,   

His picket teeth, these left their mark   

But never did explain the joke

That so amused him, lying there

While the moon went down to disappear   

Along the still and tilted track

   That bears the zodiac.