Picked Up My Zither and Begun Walking and Strumming Like an Idiot

• Olive, yesterday.
• She's probably the one candidate who could lose to Trump, said my Hillaryite Colleague, back in for Hillary, just not as enthusiastically as once. She's not losing to Trump, I said. Yesterday was Illhoptay Day at Illhoptay, a one day cross between Red Hour and Amok Time except lame because drunk ugrads. A parade of students marched to Dixie Liquor to buy or having bought carried back a 30 pack of Notbeer Light in each hand. Bernie shirts, not everywhere but enough to be noted. Bernie'll bring enough home, I said, shrugging at the students, Trump's supporters will scare them home, plus remember that SCOTUS thing, we're gonna be hammered over the head with it for months. I don't know, he said, she could fuck it up. Here's hoping, I said. What, he said, you want Trump. I want to be entertained, I said. That's selfish, he said. Who isn't, I said, and she's not going to lose to Trump.
• This was three in the afternoon. In the bushes next to Poulton Hall, twenty yards away, one student lay unconscious face down in his puke, his buddy puking his way to unconsciousness. I could tell you one had on a Bernie shirt, the other a Trump shirt, but I'd be lying.
• The zombies among us.
• Meeting nowhere, no before or after.
• Satanists are furious Boehner compared Cruz to Lucifer.
• Clintonism before Clinton.
• The author of ▲ responds to a neoliberal responding to ▲.
• Rhyton, people?

• Otherwise progressive and leftist people.
• Anarchism and terrorism.
• Hollywood trolling you with Snowden movie.
• Planet has spend this last academic year working at tiny A_____ College in A______ Michigan. This, about the economic struggles small colleges are suffering.
• I have zero desire to read Zero K.
• Cellular dance in blue.
• Because it's none of your fucking business?
• Political novels. The scene I remember from Rabbit, Redux is Rabbit, dressed as Uncle Sam in a 4th of July parade, sweating so hard his fake beard can't stick, his heart racing alarmingly, Rabbit popping nitroglycerin pills.
• Notes for an ultimate prosody.
• Dexter Gordon.
• Below the fold.

MY MOST RECENT POSITION PAPER

Bob Hicok

A little bit of hammering
goes a long way toward making
the kind of noise I want my heart
to look up to—or have you ever
gone into a woods and applauded the light
that fights its way to the ground,
and the shadows, and the explosions
of feathers where blue jays
have been ripped into the bright
and hungry future of hawks—
and there’s this—writing an etude
by pushing pianos off a cliff
until one of them howls or whispers
just so—like a vagrant
slipping into a clean bed
or a man lifting a dying child
toward the sun and begging help,
rescue—if my eyes could speak,
they’d be mouths—the tongues
of my fingers ask to be words
against your skin—and when I
was a librarian, I lost my job
for exhorting patrons to sing
“Bye Bye Miss American Pie”—
it’s not what we do here, I was told—
yet I know this is a world
made by volcanoes, and don’t want
to keep this awareness of kaboom
to myself—so have picked up
my zither and begun walking
and strumming like an idiot
who thinks music is all
a body needs to feed itself—
and though I haven’t eaten
in years, I have been fed.