*Hydrate." Please

5th row center, me and Earthgirl and Planet and Air. New album 50 Song Memoir drops early 2017:

Unlike Merritt’s previous work, the lyrics on 50 Song Memoir are nonfiction, a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis). There is one song per year for the fifty years since the songwriter’s birth in 1965. Musically, the sound ranges as widely and adventurously as possible, within the context of lyrics-driven music. 

In concert, the music will be played and sung by seven performers in a stage set featuring fifty years of artifacts both musical (vintage computers, reel-to-reel tape decks, newly invented instruments), and decorative (tiki bar, shag carpet, vintage magazines for the perusal of idle musicians). The seven performers each play seven different instruments, traditional (cello, charango, clavichord) or invented in the last fifty years (Slinky guitar, Swarmatron, synthesizer).

Nonfiction. Cause Merritt's never dipped into his life for his music before.

• Return.
• At least it's not patriarchy.
• Somebody hacked into Montag's place and posted at Stump Lane.
• This is why there is a blogroll called Moribund.
• This week in water.
• Nemo's Almanac?
• Bottom's Dream. I've twice had it in Dalkey's cart then told myself don't, it's a curiosity not a need, I'm not going to read it, plus there's the problem of translation - I've worked past my issues of novels in translation, still have issues with poetry in translation, what the fuck to do with gibberish (this is not a pejorative term!) in translation?
• Bottom's Dream, week three.
• OK, so now it's been in Dalkey's cart three times.
• Orchestral manipulations.
• Stream the new Leonard Cohen.
• All Merritt projects innermost circle of my rotating three seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five game. Lots here.

MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION

Lucie Brock-Broido

Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known

Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows

Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar

At the altar where I've knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough

As sugar raw, and sweet. From the outside, peering in, it would seem

My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom

Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire,

Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stop—simply

                                As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life,

I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth

On it. I was just imagining. I can be

Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves,

I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.

                                                  In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please.

Hydration only. Do not resume me then.