- I owe you links - but first, a protip: don't forget, like I do every year, that not everyone makes High Egoslavian Holy Days out of Berio and Berryman and Gubaidulina birthdays - but second: blogroll maintenance completed. Moribund have been moved to moribund, the dead just removed. There are some new places I encourage you to try when they float to top of respective blogrolls. As always, thanks for reading, as always, if you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know.
- A friend's bleggalgaze. I'd wondered about the quiet.
- Another friend breaks a long bleggal silence.
- Duality of silence.
- The "courage" of no convictions.
- Pink slip for the progress fairy.
- The face of gentrification.
- Gentrification.
- On genius and assholity.
- On the above: this genius crap needs to be over, and iyer's piece is as good an argument for shooting geniuses on sight as for celebrating them as transhuman god-monsters.
- Frances on individual protest against the system in New Mexico.
UPDATE! MONDAY'S LINKS
- Please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber and his beloved cats.
- A friend's bleggalgaze. Consider this Monday's monologue.
- >> Deleted bleggalgaze << Postponed, not killed.
- Though this new post of the previous six posts is bleggalgazing if nothing else.
- Dreamboat vampires and zombie capitalists.
- Listen closely and The Forgotten.
- The Grateful Dead's sound system.
- When Updike met Barth.
- Conlon Nancarrow was born 102 years ago today:
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Robert Wyatt on the soundtrack of his life.
- Know how when a promisingly striking novel drives the station-wagon into predictable plot-points and fucks up your reading for a week?
- Morton Feldman, complete works for piano and violin.
- David Bowie: the art exhibit - not by him, of him.
- Did you know he has a new single out? I think it awful, to tell the truth, but that doesn't explain the strange lack of notice it's receiving.
- Berryman interviewed.
- John Berryman turns 100.
DREAM SONG 76
John Berryman
Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? —I explain that, Mr Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
—If life is a handkerchief sandwich,
in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
—You is from hunger, Mr Bones,
I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
—I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
BORN ONE-HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY
DREAM SONG 133
John Berryman
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:
he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights
of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.
DREAM SONG 105
As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.
As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'
Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.
The required Egoslavian litany of Berryman's birthday:
John Berryman was born 100 years ago today. I was 21 when Pary Gittenger, an English teacher at Montgomery College, Rockville, loaned me his copy of Dream Songs and changed my life. Thank you, Pary.
DREAM SONG 29
John Berryman
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
EIGHTY-THREE TODAY
- Offertorium part one, part two, part three.
- Pro et Contra part one, part two, part three.
- String Quartet #1, #2, #3.
- Introitus.
- Musical Toys part one, part two.
- Glorious Percussion.
*
*
EIGHTY-NINE TODAY
Luciano Berio. I loved his music before one of his pieces became an integral part of Egoslavian history. Click his tag if you're curious. Don't worry, you're not. Sofia Gubaidulina's birthday post later today, Berryman's centennial tomorrow, otherwise fuck it fuck me fuck this, because of fuck it fuck me fuck this.
EIGHTY-THREE TOMORROW
Not only is tomorrow Luciano Berio's eighty-ninth birthday, it is Sofia Gubaidulina's eighty-third, double High Egoslavian Holy Day Eve. Yes, I post this piece all the time, that's how MSADI5G works.
EIGHTY-NINE TOMORROW
Berio's birthday, a High Egoslavian Holy Day, is tomorrow, and, as will be seen in the standard Egoslavian Berio birthday post, always sparks major bleggalgazing, much of which I will spare you. Yes, that sentence, while true, written as much for the gag as content. So I haven't spared you bleggalgazing at all, nor the history of this shitty blog.
THE WILL
John Berryman
A frail vague man, in whom our sense ached
With nothing, began to whisper with himself
At line-up, from the rear, -
We trembled for him, - shook the scald that caked
His skull, totting up phantoms none could solve,
Fag-end of a career.
(Shadowless in a cairn, four lights. Farewell,
The legacy trots off,
A swimming moment of the stiff's desire
Such decades since. Or nothing trots to tell
Intestate once with love
Pain brain stood up a bit out of time's mire.)
He scrambled one night out
And dodged between the lights far to the wire,
Where he lodged. I suppose he crisped, dying in fire;
A shot or so, a shout;
But certainly, lifting our scalps, well beyond fear,
He suddenly sang, sang, hanging on the wire.
One More Mile Interview and Image by Frances Madeson
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