That Was the Day We First Realized We Didn't Fully Know Our Names, Yours or Mine, and We Left Quietly Amid the Gray Snow Falling

• Earthgirl clearing path for Momcat and Frankie to get to food this morning. They didn't stay in the heated cat tents we bought. There's eighteen inches so far, we're supposedly only halfway as I type this. While it is true that I don't mind being marooned as much as I once did, I still hate motherfucking snow as much and more than ever.
• Snow, not laziness, is why Earthgirl left the giftmas lights up.
• Blegsylvanian news. I've had zero response to my one solicitation to revive Blogroll Amnesty Day on February 1. I followed a link a few days ago to a blog that rolled all the blogs I tried to gain a spot on the rolls in 2008 - remember Booman and Dohiyi Mir and Upyernoz and etc? - and it was like visiting a Western Pennsylvania ghost town both politically (before my apostasies, when I was still a tribalist) and bleggally (Blegsylvania dying, yo). As for Dusty - she was always Kind to me.
• I think Dohiyi Mir once blogrolled me, I think he was the only Eschatonian who did.
• Be Kind, motherfuckers.
• Attacking Sanders is about attacking Warren?
• Today's rhetorical question. 
• Hillary laughs.
• The day someone bombs a US wedding.
• An intolerable enormity. Worth the read, but also, the first time in ages I've seen the word enormity used correctly.
• Ceravolo.
• Rivers and mountains.
• Here's the big news: NEW TINDERSTICKS!

CROSSROADS IN THE PAST

John Ashbery

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

Novelty Is No Better Than Repetition

• Fleabus in a hamper last night. Fleabus has rallied from her depression at Olive's arrival. She can only be a kitten for bursts - she is ten? eleven? twelve? - but she's bursting to be a kitten again.
• Every major snowstorm's approach and delivery since I got my drivers license forty years ago PISSED ME OFF! until tonight's/tomorrow's. This time? I'm ready to be marooned.
• It is a shame to waste on a weekend: I wish the storm obliterated a week of work, but.
• I have no plans to publish or not publish  during the storm, nor do I wish for outages, though internet before power, please.
• I hoped briefly & mehly for an internet outage, where's the quitting in that?
• Elizabeth Warren was tweeted last night, she was making her I'm a rebel, Dottie noises about motherfucking Triskelions. Folk were oh my, my hero!
• I posed a question on twuuter, how much pleasure would I - and you, I guess, if you want to play - get from watching Clinton Inc FREAK THE FUCK OUT! if Bernie Sanders this Saturday stood in front of a rapturous Iowa City crowd and introduced Elizabeth Warren as his running mate to-be?
• I'm gonna enjoy this Trump phenomenon, especially and predominantly in light of who Sanders and Warren will be endorsing for POTUS come summer.
• Moderation.
• Cowboy Isis.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• Medial neglect and black boxes.
• On CD Wright's poetry.
• UPDATE! New P.J. Harvey song!
• Gnod?

THE WATER WAS RISING

Lyn Hejinian

The water was rising, I got up on the bed

Still wearing the Hawaiian shirt he had on yesterday

He used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the wall

Hitting Beirut and killing 22 civilians

But now go the bells, and we are ready

Novelty is no better than repetition

That graces the walls of toilet stalls with hooey

And comparison with the dead—their slimy cruelty—and meatballs

Perched like ghostly birds

Believing in old men’s lies, then too late unbelieving

There’s rough life in the rust

Long-buried whore’s eggs, razor-clams with shells

Pirates dressed in pink and pit-bulls on parade

With power to extend the longevity of learned fear in the mouse

And a heron on the horizon many sewing-days ago

Jane, Jane, ascend the stairs

Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn

Thus predicting the shock to the tale that so entertains grown children

Of the animals that have nearly all forsaken us

The Extreme Austerity of an Almost Empty Mind

• On Trump's supporters: There are a number of Americans who are losers from a process of economic globalization that enriches a transnational global elite. These Middle Americans see jobs disappearing to Asia and increased competition from immigrants. Most of them feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees Middle Americans as loathsome white bigots. But they are also threatened by conservatives who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment too.... What so frightens the conservative movement about Trump's success is that he reveals just how thin the support for their ideas really is. His campaign is a rebuke to their institutions. It says the Republican Party doesn't need all these think tanks, all this supposed policy expertise. It says look at these people calling themselves libertarians and conservatives, the ones in tassel-loafers and bow ties. Have they made you more free? Have their endless policy papers and studies and books conserved anything for you? These people are worthless. They are defunct. You don't need them, and you're better off without them.
• Same colleague yesterday as last time I did this gag on our conversation back in November or December: Trump Cruz Trump Cruz Trump Cruz. Me in response: _____________.
• Because I'm not going to change her mind, and she is not going to change mine.
• Though my mind is changing - I understand the Trump phenomenon is more than a fuck you; it's still a fuck you, but a deeper, more complex, and more valid fuck you than I credited.
• How I haven't changed my mind: The Democrats answer is..... Hillary Clinton... and fuck you, Democrats.
• Because none of this is by accident, as in, Oligarchs may not be able to predict the particulars of public reaction to imposed precarity, but the precarity was imposed by design.
• Bowie's favorite 25 albums.
• Bowie impersonates Dylan, Springsteen, Iggy.....
• Name the Get Smart allusion this band's name evokes (I assume unintentionally, but I can hope).

AND UT PICTURA POESIS IS HER NAME

John Ashbery

You can’t say it that way any more.   

Bothered about beauty you have to   

Come out into the open, into a clearing,

And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you

Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange

Of you, you who have so many lovers,   

People who look up to you and are willing   

To do things for you, but you think

It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .

So much for self-analysis. Now,

About what to put in your poem-painting:   

Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.   

Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,   

Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?

There are a lot of other things of the same quality   

As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must

Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,

Dull-sounding ones. She approached me

About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was   

Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.   

Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head

Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something   

Ought to be written about how this affects   

You when you write poetry:

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind

Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate   

Something between breaths, if only for the sake   

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you

For other centers of communication, so that understanding

May begin, and in doing so be undone.

Olive's Ear

• So I took down a poem I just posted but since I fed the feed I feel a responsibility to provide product. That's Olive's ear in sunlight, yesterday. It isn't that I don't like the poem, it's just fuck that. So, a couple of links now, more later (or not), songs later (or not), someone else's poem later (or not). Fuck it, I've not done a post this way, let me flail and fail at it too. Check back through the day. Or not.
• Spooked American Coots.
• On Divine (h/t Hamster).
• Don't trust sociologists.
• A transformed inwardness of time.
• One of the multiple clusterfucks in my life right now. I'm pro-student, btw, but I'm the good cop (to my overlords' dismay).
• My yard is scheduled to get up to three feet of snow Friday night into Saturday and we're being warned of a paralyzed week with potentially no power and even with power widespread internet/cable outages. Here's one example of how life has changed. Once - up to last year, in fact - the idea of being trapped in my house with no access to leave and no access to wire would have infuriated me. Now I'm, like, please please please.
• Here' today's poem, William Carlos Williams' Blizzard.
• Brad just put this song in my head! be in yours!

It Was Domestic Thunder, the Color of Spinach

• I'm at home getting furnace surgery, trying to get work done from my laptop, guess who wants to play?
• This past Sunday afternoon someone knocked on my front door. Maryland's primary is in little over three months, I'd seen canvassers in the neighborhood since the New Year. I figured it was a canvasser, though because it might have been a neighbor I answered the door. It was a canvasser, a mid-60s woman working for Chris Van Hollen, the shoe-in Democratic Senate candidate to replace the retiring Barbara Mikulski, and Hillary Clinton. I said, I don't vote, but if I did vote for this office in the primary I'd vote for Donna Edwards and Bernie Sanders. She said, you don't vote? I said, I haven't since the 2008 general election. She looked at her clipboard, I'm still on the rolls. But you'll vote for the Democratic candidates in this November's election, won't you? she said. Probably not if it's Sanders, definitely not if it's Clinton, I said. She said, lots of people say that now - the last four people today I've talked to said something to that effect, but you'll vote against the alternative even if not for Clinton.
• Insist.
• OK, I said, thank you. To her credit she did not then ask for a donation to the DNC.
• Fire at the refuge.
• On protests and crowds.
• The Federal Reserve of Defense Act.
• Don't miss the deadline.
• Art Decade.
• Ashbery's poems, Cornell's boxes, and nostalgia.
• Yes, reading Ashbery makes me think of the toggle from black & white TV to color, my Wyakin, that toggle.
• Wyakin (as defined by Vollmann in the glossary to The Dying Grass): Relating to the specific power of fearsomeness or invulnerability in war, or success at hunting or other difficult things, achieved through the fasting and sleeplessness of a vision quest. In effect, the Wyakin was a guardian spirit. Each man or woman lucky enough to meet one was assigned a personal taboo (for instance, White Thunder was not permitted to smoke). A Wyakin could be anything from shore ice to a wolf (as was White Thunder's) to a beetle or a night ghost.
• I am not permitted to smoke either either.
• Best reading experience of what feels like the last dozen years. If I like you and you ask nice I will buy you a copy - but not for two paycheck cycles, I'm having furnace surgery right now, gonna set me back big - and you promise to try - not promise to finish, promise to try.

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

John Ashbery

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,   

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,

From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant   

To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched

Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.   

“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder   

Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment

Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.   

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach   

When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”

But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder   

And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment   

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched

Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment

And all that it contains, myself and spinach

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched   

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”   

She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”

“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”   

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment

Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant

Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach

Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched

One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country

Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,   

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

[Haiku's lattices]