We Shall Very Soon Have the Pleasure of Recording a Period of Unanimous Tergiversation in This Respect and to Make That Pleasure the Greater, It Is Worth While at the Risk of Tedious Iteration, to Put First Upon Record a Final Protest

Reminder: Fleabus.

• Tergiversation = evasion of straightforward answer
• Clabbered = food produced by allowing unpasteurized milk to turn sour at a specific humidity and temperature. Over time, the milk thickens or curdles into a yogurt-like substance with a strong, sour flavor.
• Spumous = foam or froth on a liquid.
• Pleonectic = morbidly greedy or covetous

From one paragraph of Jack Cox's Dodge Rose, one of two novels I'm currently reading (de la Pava's A Naked Singularity the other). I'd guessed the first and third, never heard of the second and fourth, can't believe I never heard of the fourth. Dodge Rose whispers, Naked Singularity screams, I'm alternating days. Working so far. Now that I've just jinxed myself. Fuck me.

But yes, this to get to the Ashbery poem I thought of when I saw the word tergiversation in a novel. Oh, and the Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer which I bought as my birthday present (it's sometime this month) last night (not yesterday, not today). Also too, get the self-portrait (one person said s/he saw me) off the top.

• There is a halo around the moon.
• Where's your fucking apocalypse?
• History of the measure of memory.
• Living in a world on fire.
• Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger. The case for voting for Clinton/against Trump as opposed to voting for the Green Party. I call multiple bullshit on some of Reed's points, but I have never said the case can't be made, it's just not the case that I'd make for yadda yodels I've yodeled yaddaly.
• On the above article. 
• Liberal hate for the Green Party.
• The ideology of the Olympics.
• Dostoyevsky's fantastic truth. I finished the Karamazov rereading. I don't do book reviews, but - as always, the ending slightly erodes the good faith the rest of the book built.

THE BUNGALOWS

John Ashbery

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,

The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away

So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth

Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—

Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.

And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,

The presumed landscape and the dream of home

Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,   

Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes

Became so extraneous and so near

To create a foreground of quiet knowledge

In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that   

Will sign for old age

And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;

The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:   

Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.

During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent

Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that   

The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,   

Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike   

In falsetto starlight like “purity”

Of design that had been the first danger sign

To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui!

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,

The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting

The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written   

Bearing to a final point of folly and doom

The wisdom of these generations.

Look at what you’ve done to the landscape—

The ice cube, the olive—

There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things

Extending all the way along the river on both sides

With the end left for thoughts on construction

That are always turning to alps and thresholds

Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording

A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect

And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while

At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:   

Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to

An impossible “calque” of reality, than

“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,   

Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life

Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,   

All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,

What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal

Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.   

But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning   

There can be no further discussion.

And the river pursues its lonely course

With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape

For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur.

“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain

Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”

All this came to pass eons ago.

Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided

The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:

A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,

An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.

Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,   

Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—

For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar

The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,

Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,

For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful

As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,   

To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.   

Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,   

For standing still means death, and life is moving on,

Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.