Friday, October 3, 2014

Still, It Lets You Walk About on Tiptoe If You Don't Jiggle the Needle



  • I didn't feel like posting a Wallace Stevens birthday post. I went to collect poems and they didn't sing for me like once they did, or rather, I could not hear the singing like once I could. It happens.
  • So yes, the Dark is back. It happens.
  • Updates on two stories in the above photo: my bashed toe, with slowly growing new nail, and Napoleon is a free cat. Vet came yesterday, gave him clean bill of health, Animal Control came last night, said we could let him out of quarantine. He immediately ran to front door and begged to be let out. We knew that was going to happen and steeled ourselves to be jerks and refuse, at least for a week or so to see what happens indoors. We expected hissing from other cats - or rather, one cat, Jess, the anti-Fleabus - but are shocked and disappointed to find it's Rosie, big, loving, easy-purring Rosie, the last of the four we would have picked to hiss who is hissing.
  • The Intercept: the whole ugly mess laid bare from top to bottom.
  • Dwindling domain will break your heart.
  • Rob is more optimistic than me re: the clusterfuck.
  • Consider the troll. Disclosure: back in this blog's early days Ed did multiple Kinds and bumps for me, hence this link (if even only I remember, I don't want to appear I'm ignoring this to avoid troll's taint). He never did turn on me - I'm nobody - but he has increasingly picked more fights with more ugliness as the years have passed.
  • The latest Nobel lit prize betting odds.
  • Burtonsville!
  • My Future Hell! It's not North Bethesda, it's ROCKVILLE. There is no such thing as North Bethesda.
  • The Washington Woods section of Gaithersburg? Realtor assholes, do you mean Muddy Branch?
  • White Art.
  • A sentence containing almost all of science fiction?
  • Thanks to all who've participated in helping pick the Fleabus photo to be submitted to WFMU's great marathon ploy to raise money, the give us $50 and enter your pet to be station mascot scam. Fleabus is not going to win, no matter how deserving: some friend of some DJ who owns an armadillo wearing a WFMU bandanna or something is going to win. The Fleabus photo that got the most votes, including Planet's which, since she is the photographer, trumps, is, Bless Serendipity, a photo for the Dark.





I made noise about giving DC United one last chance - tonight, an eight o'clock game against Kansas City, United's primary opposition for winning the Eastern Conference, the biggest regular season home game in recent memory. I almost certainly wasn't going to go anyway, but last night, flipping stations in futile hope of finding something worth watching, I landed on the Orioles-Tigers playoff game and noticed the Orioles' uniforms had Tom Clancy's name on a sleeve. I tweeted out, why do the Orioles have the name of a rightwing hack novelist on their uniforms and received answer that Clancy not only was a Baltimore native but was part-owner of the Orioles, a timely reminder to fuck fandom. Fuck fuck fuck it. I wouldn't have gone to tonight's DCU game regardless - I'm done - though the smack-in-the-face reminder that I don't want to dress in uniform and chant for Triskelions' mercenaries in was much welcome.








TO THE MUSE

James Wright

It is all right. All they do
Is go in by dividing
One rib from another. I wouldn’t   
Lie to you. It hurts
Like nothing I know. All they do   
Is burn their way in with a wire.
It forks in and out a little like the tongue   
Of that frightened garter snake we caught   
At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny   
So long ago.

I would lie to you
If I could.
But the only way I can get you to come up   
Out of the suckhole, the south face
Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you   
What you know:

You come up after dark, you poise alone   
With me on the shore.   
I lead you back to this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don’t have to call them, they are always there.   
But they only have to put the knife once   
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you   
Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t   
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube   
Keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you   
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy   
And disastrous place. I
Didn’t, I can’t bear it
Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there   
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring,   
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don’t blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.   
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.



6 comments:

  1. Yes. Cars exist. Get the fuck over it.

    Burtonsville Crossing should be blowed up real good. It was dreadful before they reconstructed the 198 interchange, and the reconstruction made Burtonsville palpably worse. Sure, a mosaic district would be nice, but as even the maladept Dan Reed can see, Burtonsville and the northeast county don't have the density or infrastructure to support that kind of retail intensity--especially with the Maple Lawn megaplex just up the pike in HoCo. And for once, I think that building that kind of infrastructure would be bad. It's a weird day when I agree with Dan Reed twice.

    The development's actually named Washingtonian Woods, but yeah, one of its boundaries is Muddy Branch Road. And it's unfortunate that they bought into a development bounded by significant pieces of the Master Plan; I have exactly as much sympathy for them as I do for people who, in the 1980s and 1990s, bought property along the ICC. The CCT is supposed to go through Belward, which will be a much bigger nightmare for people in the Muddy Branch Road neighborhoods (and anyone living in the Greater Route 28 universe) than CCT will ever be. If it's ever even built.

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  2. As always, any arrgh in My Future Hells involving White Flint are aimed solely at what asshole realtors call it.

    Planet desperately wants Nobesoro. Alas, Planet doesn't always get what she wishes for.

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  3. 0)speaking of moco retail intensity, lakeforest mall is limping more and more - and it has penny's at one end and sears at the other, so future developments will tend to be not necessarily to its advantage - to twist a saying of yogi berra - no one goes there anymore, it's not crowded enough

    1)glad your toe is getting better and glad the cat is now only under house arrest, not solitary confinement

    2)Actor Bill Murray reads two poems by Wallace Stevens at Bubby's Brooklyn, as part of Poets House's 17th Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge, Monday June 11, 2012

    The Planet on the Table

    A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaT_2cL33R4

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  4. Landru,

    No. There's no getting over cars. Go fuck yourself in a car. Because humans exist.

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    Replies
    1. Tom meet Landru, Landru meet Tom.

      The line is an inside-joke on a forty year running gag, mostly, on the county we live in and its silly zoning and planning and self-anguishing over maintaining its self-image as a Liberal utopia while simultaneously making plan after plan that appears utopic but is just fucked enough to guarantee both the problem set out to fix isn't while all the appropriate local overlords get justly recompensed. Or at least that's how I read it.

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  5. I think this is the essential problem with cheering for sports - I am Canadian and hockey here really is like football and baseball combined - is that the owners are of course giant assholes. In my town, we recently pledged a quarter billion public dollars for the richest man in town's combination arena-casino. On the one hand, hockey does matter. (Less as I age.) On the other hand, fuck that guy.

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