Bumping yesterday's RIP John Stabb post because.
This is true, Earthgirl can vouch what I said though she did not turn her head to look at the shirt. Last Friday we ate at our favorite restaurant ever, the Thai joint in Wheaton on Amherst, a bored ten year wore a Government Issue t-shirt in the stenciled font, I said, there's a kid over there in a Government Issue shirt, I wonder if anyone he knows knows what he's wearing. Serendipity, always glorious, can be a bitch.
- Seventy years later.
- The rhetoric and lethargy of the anthropocene.
- The subaltern and the proletariat of the world.
- The end of Europe.
- The science of political communication.
- Hey, look, Obama just gave his patrons $87.5B.
- How Austin Indiana became HIV capital of rural America.
- Trump is Mao?
- The Intercept's new leak policy.
- The singularity is near. Dan reviews new book on lit theory.
- Googlebots crawl me all the time, but now a DuPont bot and Amazon bot, the fuck?
- My apologies, I didn't forget I just am running late, Adrienne Rich was born 87 years ago day before yesterday.
PLANETARIUM
Adrienne Rich
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.