BLCKDGRD: 2014-12-28

Saturday, January 3, 2015

This Has Not Been a Filmways Presentation, Darling

That there is a sound of my childhood, RIP Donna Douglas. She was never a crush of mine no matter how many times CBS put her in a one-piece bathing suit down by the cement pond, but that This Has Been a Filmways Presentation evokes waves of nostalgia. I've written before about how much the toggle from black & white television to color television when I was six or seven affected my, for lack of a better word, psyche. I do know that to this day seeing the spectacle of a black & white Get Smart beats the spectacle of a color Get Smart regardless of the actual quality of the individual episode. Last week, flipping channels in middle of night when I couldn't sleep, I stumbled on a World War Two in Color. The particular episode covered the days of Nazi Germany's highwater, after the conquest of France, before the invasion of the USSR, showed Wehrmacht marches and wild civilian celebrations of conquest in primary colors, not countless blacks, greys, and whites. My internal footage of World War Two is in black & white with Laurence Olivier narrating. I changed the channel.

Below is Eva Gabor's. UPDATE! At first I condemned Eva's for being in color, my assumption that Donna Douglas' was in black and white my imagination. Fine metaphors abound.

Friday, January 2, 2015

Record Breaking Thriller Dance Attempt

Fabio played the above yesterday, made me think of the the Lambchop below. Fabio also played the John Cale at post's bottom.
When I was a zealous American Liberal/Democrat - when I would, for example, stoke a silly righteous rage that an extreme rightwing racist politician from a conservative state would speak before a gathering of extreme racist rightwingers - it was Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic Convention Keynote Speech that plucked most sanctimoniously on my heart strings.
Police: a reminder.
MY PROMISE TO YOU: I WILL NEVER USE A GAG WHERE I TYPE POLICE AND LINK TO GORDON SUMNER'S SHITTY FUCKING POLICE. I LOVE YOU ALMOST AS MUCH AS I HATE GORDON SUMNER'S SHITTY FUCKING POLICE.
That's not true - I do love you, but nowhere near as much as I hate The Fucking Police.
Spectating at the end of the world.
It was twenty years ago today.
ill-founded.
What do we want, really?
Food links.
Whatever 3.0: a bleggalgaze.
My future hell.
The anti-Tolkien? Anyone wanna say anything about Michael Moorcock?
Brad's 2014 booklist.
Notes on the Modern Poetic Image (h/t).
Duncan's ten best posts of 2014. He mentions the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. Remember, February 1 is Blog Amnesty Day. Today's monologue is a much abridged another reminder: be Kind, fellow motherfuckers. And many of you have been to me of late. Thanks.
Pere Ubu: in Italia.

PARAGRAPH

Rae Armantrout

Record breaking Thriller

dance attempt.

Wolfman Jack style

dj in the video game says,

“This is Wasteland Radio

and we’re here for you”

You are here

maintaining détente

between the voices

in your head.

Immediacy is retro,

says Lytle.

Nostalgic/futuristic

scene in which

we can read the code—

green

flowing algorithms.

We can almost

slip right in.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

I'd Been Feeling Bad About the Way My Fear of Anger Had So Poorly Equipped Me for Any Kind of Revolution

The Official Egoslavian New Year's Song. Here, New Year's links before they go stale.
Someone else thought of George last night.
Four more George songs.
Thoughts on the year that was and the year to come.
The cold wet mackerel of reality.
The New Yeers Gift.
New Years Eve: The Book of the Dead.
RPM of the above post mentioned Jack Gilbert in a tweet yesterday, here, Jack Gilbert poems.

UPDATE:

POEM AT THE NEW YEAR

John Ashbery

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,
that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other
principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is.

Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the drop was
on the burr I know not. I come all
packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things,

I wonder about Australia. Is it anything like Canada?
Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete
the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system?
Can we trust others to indict us
who see us only in the evening rush hour
and never stop to think? O I was so bright about you,
my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.
At least that’s how it feels to me.

I know it as well as all the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you stood in line for things, and the soiled light was
impenitent. Spiky was one adjective that came to mind,

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.
Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke
in cafés and outside the great ashen bird
streamed from lettered display-windows, and waited
a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.

2014 sucked.
New Year's dissolution.
The imperial collapse playbook.
You’re not going to brow-beat critical race theory into the heads of people like Daniel Palenteo who relish actually beating on black people.
What was ello?
If Maryland kills the Purple Line. When, not if, probably.
Richard's year in reading.
Below, three 2014 highlights! I will buy you a copy of Nealon's Heteronomy if you ask me.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

I'm in Love with Someone That Doesn't Exist

Westerberg, one of only two people younger than me who get an Egoslavian birthday post, is fifty-five today. Yes, I pulled down the poem What I Don't Write About yesterday. I don't remember having pulled a post before for reasons other than having accidentally published a draft, and I haven't done that but once or twice in recent years (when beginning each new post I first go to Schedule and change the date to a year hence so if I plunge publish rather than save I've a year to fix). Right before I pulled the poem I got an email from a digital friend and a chain started (presented here, redacted for the same privacy issues that led to the poem being pulled):

Him: Thanks again for all the times you've linked to my silly blog. I confess I'm reaching the burned out point rapidly. How many times can one argh?! I try to keep up with stuff but the news media is so bad it makes my eyes cross. I'm concentrating on my music these days, it's much more fun.

Me: Oh, you're welcome. I use other's argh to keep mine alive. Don't know if you've seen today's post, but I've a dose of impending damnlessness too. The things I want to write about (or rather, I do write about but won't ever publish) are starting to dominate. I anagrammed them today, but fuck it.

Him: It's a funny thing how you meet people on the internet but all you really know about them is their internet presence. People actually have lives. Can I ask why you won't publish what you like to write? Are you into creative writing like Mr. Ioz?

Me: I actually pulled down the anagram poem: it's a matter of respecting the people I would write about (xxxxxx, for example, xxxxxxxxx). Etc. I admire people like Ioz who can imagine a system as large as a novel. It took me twenty years to realize I was a poet not a novelist and only ten more years to realize I am a shitty poet.

Him: I usually visit your site once a day, but I didn't get to see your anagram poem. I admire Ioz as well, he and a few others changed my outlook on things. But I'm glad he decided to finish his book. Sometimes I think art is the only worthwhile pursuit for humans. My mom and brother don't understand my views on politics and that sort of thing. I used to consider myself a liberal, now it just makes me wince to think of it. I've become much more radicalized than I was in my youth. I'll bet your poetry is better than you say. Not that I'm an expert on poetry or anything. I was going to be the next Charlie Parker but that never happened. That doesn't make me wish I never pursued music, far from it, and now I don't worry about stuff like if there are people better at it than me. That's just a waste of time. I got to the point where I was playing in bands as well as teaching, I think music is the best part of my life. The fun is in the journey, I'm better than some and some are better at it than me, the cool part is being as impeccable as you can in your art form, that's where the satisfaction is I think. Part of that is being able to be critical of your own stuff, which I can see that you are, which is why I think you're better than you let on. I had students who thought they knew everything and wanted to be coddled, they were always my worst students and a pain in the ass. If you have no humility you never get anywhere. If you don't put your poetry up on your site, how can I link to it?

Me: VNTY'SJNKYRD has stuff going back years. My ambition is weird. I actually think of BLCKDGRD as one long, never-ending poem. If it was never my intention to be too black licorice (and people do tend to strongly like or dislike BLCKDGRD) I did intend for it to be it's own brand. I will always be nobody - I say this without bitterness or pride - because I really do it solely to make me happy.

I come from a family of teachers - both parents, my wife, my favorite aunts and uncles are teachers - so I think I know what you speak of re: students (and I work at Illhoptay University Library with a huge collection of self-entitled students): my father has always said if you get three out of a hundred students engaged and interactive with you as a teacher that's at least one more than most teachers.

The conversation may - I hope it does - continue though I'll end it here for here. This posted as a year end bleggalgaze. The date is arbitrary, the intent is not. I am disappointed in myself for having pulled the poem while simultaneously certain I was right to do so. That it was written in anagrams doesn't mean it couldn't be deciphered. That I liked the poem, and liked placing it on the image I chose, doesn't make writing it in code and posting it any braver than not posting it at all. And then there is the related matter of VNTY'SJNKYRD, why do I need a second joint? My fuck-it-ness needs reexamination. I mean more than usual. As well as my why-the-fuck-ness. I know part of that - see/listen to this Gabriel song - this one too. Which is to say I hope to write both more autobiographically than before while simultaneously opening up huge new swathes of what I write about that I don't post here, the latter hopefully making the former better. So yes, more bleggalgazing - black licorice that it is - seems inevitable. As always, thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Sixty-Eight Today

Patti Smith is sixty-eight today. Hard to believe, youngsters, she once upon a time !!!!ed folk. I was young once too.

Monday, December 29, 2014

You're the Only Serious Person in the Room, Aren't You, the Only One Who Understands, and You Can Prove It by the Fact that You've Never Finished a Single Thing in Your Life

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

William Gaddis, born ninety-two years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.

Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).

- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

- Gaddis, JR

I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

- Gaddis, Recognitions