Whoever Loved Him He Loved, Whoever Hated Him He Hated Back

• So, guess what I listened to last night. Friends below have new content, but post mostly for more Negativland. RIP Don Joyce.
• Loss, and rededication.
• Triumph of the Trump. It's an intriguingly fucked-up knot: Trump's popularity to the Angry White Right is based solely on Trump's candidacy pissing you off and if you demonstrate your contempt for the Angry White Right you please the Angry White Right which strengthens Trump's candidacy and thus makes Inevitability more inevitable. 
• A friend insists Trump's candidacy is in the service of Cruz, staking out vast maps of crazy whose vacuum, post-Trump, Cruz can fill while looking less crazy than Cruz is.
• #Consumerism #Depression #Change.
• Jim's bug-splat count, with mileage.
• What Lincoln left. New novel by Tom LeClair, a critic of postmodern fiction whose scholarship has influenced my reading of especially Stanley Elkin and Pynchon amongst others. Is it rational I should fear reading his fiction? Cause I do. (And Lincoln - snore.)
• Ten more Negativland songs below the fold below the song below the poem (including, finally, the U2 song).

THE NEGATIVE

Tom Sleigh

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures

in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores

but technical details, like going rafting

down the Colorado River; and when he wrote

about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience

was with his stepfather, the friend told him

it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing

that could have happened . . . I saw then that God,

who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart

as a negative: that the negative had been developed

into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky

on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows

to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it—

a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses

jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting

and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes

that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain

as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids

of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing

for what you want, depending on the equipment,

the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek

of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed

in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind

of "spooky action at a distance," he communed

with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter

who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles

where he hides himself away—his sanctuary

Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves

bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears—

and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred

the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem

that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . .

—That was how it was in those days, back when my friend

hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down

his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse"

that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . .

And regardless if I believed, whenever

we were together God shone clearer—

those were the days when every morning God woke up

in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night

in divine rage. Whoever loved him,

he loved. Whoever hated him,

he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality

of hate or the volatility of love.

 
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