These Fishbone Days, This Fatty Grief

• Because the last consideration when I make a snap decision fifteen seconds into the first time I hear a song I'm going to love it forever are the lyrics. I give it an 84 of 85, Dick, it's got a beat and it's easy to dance to.
  

• Also too: I've got a vacuum cleaner in my head. It sucks up everything I know.
• This is related to the Kate Bush thing from yesterday's post, sorta, or at least started from there. 
• Szymborska poem for Aleppo.
• The myth of the Rust Belt revolt.
• So yes, we're (colleagues, friends, Loved Ones) gonna yell at each other still. 
• It's a knot, it sucks. I'm yelled at I didn't recognize the danger of a Trump presidency, I yell you didn't recognize the danger of a Clinton candidacy. 
• Bauman: What I believe we are currently witnessing is a thorough re-hashing of allegedly untouchable principles of „democracy.“ There is, for instance, a distinct possibility of the traditional safeguards (such as Montesquieu’s division of power into three autonomous – legislative, executive and judiciary – sectors, or the British „checks and balances“ system) falling out of public favour and being stripped of significance, replaced explicitly or matter-of-factly by condensation of power within an authoritarian or even dictatorial model. The cases you’ve named are some of the multiplying symptoms of a tendency to – so to speak – bring power from the nebulous elitist heights where it has been placed or has drifted „closer to home“: into a direct communication between the strong (wo)man at the top and the aggregate of their supporters/subjects, equipped with „social websites“ as media for indoctrination/opinion surveys. 
• Tweet storm worth your while.
• Death and Taxes.
• Mad Dog.
• I confess Stephen Dixon has never sung to me (I blame me) but if he ever sang to you here's Dan's review of Dixon's new short stories.
• David Thomas interview, found yesterday: There’s no such thing as culture. Culture doesn’t exist. It’s a hoax. it’s a damn hoax. Every bit of progress of human kind in the arts, science, technology, or politics or anything you want to break it down to has come from loners. If cancer is ever cured, it’ll come from some ridiculed loner working in his basement, people laughing at him. Sometimes loners run into other loners and sparks happen and the loners get together and they make something happen. Those things are always volatile. There are people who talk about the Cleveland scene we came out of and it was brutally volatile because it was made up of loners. You ask ‘how can loners work together?’ Well, baseball is a perfect example. Baseball is the beautiful game that pits one team of loners against another team of loners. Baseball at its root is an individual competition at each stage. The batter versus the pitch. The fielder versus the hit ball and on and on. It’s not that loners don’t cooperate or can’t cooperate, but they only cooperate on their own terms. Name one accomplishment that has come from corporatism. Nothing. Nothing in the entire history of humanity. Nothing. It’s loners. And we’re the king of the loners. [laughs]
• See yesterday's post title, chosen before seeing ▲. Serendipity be Blessed. 
• I'm not a loner, Dottie.
• For the record, the Ray Gun Suitcase, Pennsylvania, St Arkansas trilogy he mentions? My favorite Ubu.
• I do know the lyrics. Though it was the last thing I considered.
• From Ray Gun Suitcase, BLCKDGRD Theme Song 2:

HARD-WIRED

Jenny Xie

A misfortune can swell
for a long, long time in the mind.
  
While goodness shrinks
down to a hard shell.
  
I reach for the hammer,
but it doesn't crack.
  
Evolutionarily, it makes sense.
  
These fishbone days, this fatty grief. 

I Dread Multitudes Yet Have Zero Capacity for Solitude

• Fleabus, night before last. Best cat ever.
• And then I started to rank them - Fleabus Number 1, Clover Number 2, Napoleon Number 3 - and what the fuck is wrong with me?
• Olive has dropped a spot - she's developed a mean streak. She's simultaneously gotten smarter and funnier. Fine metaphors abound. I've dropped today's me three spots in my me ranking.
• Scapegoating is the cement of group identities.
• On political correctness, the straw man (and it's role in scapegoating).
• Underestimating Trump & Bannon and a pertinent follow-up w recent historical examples.
• There is nothing Democrats can do now, a friend, a polisciprof, said yesterday, to effectively derail anything Trump wants to do. That's not what I'm asking, I said. I know, she said.
• Reviving the art of threat inflation.
• Our dystopian future.
• The politics of (not) hope.
• So yesterday I snark tweeted Overlord James Fallows on his wail that facts don't matter anymore, re: duh, and then my mind immediately thought of Talking Heads' Cross-eyed and Painless, which once was one of my top fifteen most air-guitared songs for X-Date decades ago, and lordy, does it lumber like an arthritic fart. Fine metaphors abound.
• Dan's book officially released today!
• There's new Mary Ruefle?
• Sexton's Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty).
• My email tells me iTunes has dropped the new live 2014 Kate Bush into my possession. Three days ago someone tweeted a Kate Bush tweet in which she endorsed the Tory PM of Britain. I had never given a moment's thought to Kate Bush's political views - I assumed that if she did have political views they would be - what? - mine? 
• So I'm gonna wait a few days to listen, cause this is nagging at me. Everyfuckingthing nags at me. I need think about this more, scribble about it in tablet. It's not changing anything, everything changes everything. What a dumb motherfucker.

DON'T BLAME ME, I VOTED FOR A HALLUCINATION

Dean Young

Someone’s baby don’t love him
no more no no no more
twangs a workman’s radio next door.
I recommend red and plenty of it.
What’s another identity crisis
more or less? Perhaps this night
is genuine and not another
fake-out rhyme for darkness,
not that anything won’t rhyme with darkness.
I worry about a tooth, worry if
this typewriter will ever achieve
escape velocity as long as my feet
hurt. I dread new shoes.
I dread multitudes yet
have zero capacity for solitude
which may put into perspective my
befriending squirrels, strays, starting
political feuds with kindergarteners.
Perspective is for sissies.
If you can’t draw a dodecagon
on the fly, you’ll never catch
a cloud convincing enough
to vanish in or one of those
50-foot sunflowers that ate Van Gogh.

And Everybody Had a Lie You'd Like

 

• Lots of - & lots on - Pauline Oliveros.
• 20 hours of Oliveros.
• Wait - -  more Oliveros.
• Today's monologue is the second & third & fourth bullets by way of first bullet below the !!! En Attendant Ana song, I hear Deerhoof, I hear Stereolab, I hear Bettie Serveert... 
• This world at night.
• You didn't scroll ahead, did you?
• The tiger's last warning.
• Power Naratives, Part One: I will end the first part of this essay with a quote from David Foster Wallace's essay "The Empty Plenum," his analysis of David Markson's experimental novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, where he puts it, inimitably, like this:
  

T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sächer-Masoch did for whips, argues in his Gravity's Rainbow for why the paranoid delusion of complete & malevolent connection, whacko & unpleasant though it be, is preferable at least to its opposite—the conviction that nothing is connected to anything else & that nothing has anything intrinsically to do with you

• True that.
• The cycle of civilization and the twilight of neoliberalism: While this is the normal cycle of history, and is usually yawn-inducing if tragic to those caught in it, we are also at a point where we’ve done so much damage to our ecosystem that we’re in the middle of a great die-off, and we have climate change which, I suspect, now is not just beyond stopping, but which has his the exponential self-reinforcing period of its growth.
• Is this how Democracy ends? The heart of Thiel’s case for Trump was that America has become a risk-averse society, frightened of the radical change necessary for its survival. It needs disruption. But Trump is not a disruptor: he is a spiteful mischief-maker. The people who voted for him did not believe they were taking a huge gamble; they simply wished to rebuke a system on which they still rely for their basic security. That is what the vote for Trump has in common with Brexit. By choosing to quit the European Union, the majority of British voters may have looked as if they were behaving with extraordinary recklessness. But in reality their behaviour too reflected their basic trust in the political system with which they were ostensibly so disgusted, because they believed that it was still capable of protecting them from the consequences of their choice. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to his supporters because he represents the authoritarian father figure who they want to shield them from all the bad people out there making their lives hell. That can’t be right: Trump is a child, the most childish politician I have encountered in my lifetime. The parent in this relationship is the American state itself, which allows the voters to throw a tantrum and join forces with the worst behaved kid in the class, safe in the knowledge that the grown-ups will always be there to pick up the pieces.

• The first president of the post-literate world. I think Trump is worse than most think, by which I mean if he's not smart enough to figure out the new synapses changing human animal behavior, he's smart enough to hire those who do. Every tweet is the small reward dog-trainers use at a good heeling.
• Compare to motherfucking Democrats trying to get me back to the leash. Come back to me, Neera Tanden sings to me, you self-entitled selfish fuck.
• If Democrats wanted to win: Let me explain what I mean by reminding you what this form of liberalism looks like. Somewhere in a sunny corner of the country, either right now or very shortly, a group of tech tycoons or well-meaning private equity investors will meet to discuss what went wrong in this election cycle. They will consider many things: the sexism and racism of Trump voters, the fundamental foreignness of the flyover, the problems one encounters when dealing with evangelicals. They will celebrate some activist they learned about from NPR, they will enjoy some certified artisanal cuisine, they will hand out prizes to the same people that got prizes at the last event they attended, and they will go back to their comfortable rooms at the resort and sleep ever so soundly. These people think they know what liberalism includes and what it doesn’t include. And in the latter category fall the concerns that made up the heart and soul of liberal politics a few decades ago: labor and work and exploitation and economic equality.
• It's the humiliation, stupid.
• Degradation.
• Tweeter and the Monkey Man.
• I am not allowed to play Skullflower when Earthgirl is in the car.
• Lambert's 2:00PM Water Cooler each weekday, yo. 
• Listening to local sounds.
• Five revolutionary novels. As in, about revolutions. I can vouch for the Mantel.
• Beginning at the ending.

Mark Jarman ▼

Below the Upside-Down

Yesterday, meadow, Little Bennett, Browning Run Trail, with Earthgirl.

Three days of barking on a holiday weekend below the upside-down. I wanted ▲ at top of blog.

The Frog Was Not Dead but Its Brain Had Been Pithed Which Is What Happens When You Stick a Probe into the Skull and Wiggle

So, long posts on the slowest weekend of the year in Blegsylvania means (RIP Pauline Oliveros, have more of her music) I saw a Marco Rubio tweet condemning Castro for jailing Cuban gays - Rubio has opposed every attempt to provide legal protection for gays; I saw an Obama tweet condemning Castro for human rights violations - Obama has a torture facility in Cuba where prisoners have zero human rights. I feel like screaming. Both are utter duh in a post-Kayfabe world, both piss me off too fuck-me-ably.

My screaming (your screaming or not-screaming) changes nothing - is an entirely self-centered act. I've tried not screaming: I'm not good at not screaming, I tried my entire life to shut up: when I shut up I ask people to notice I've shut up and compliment me on shutting up. A friend, a former professor who made me read Christopher Lasch twenty years ago tells me go read Culture of Narcissism again for insight on myself as much as society, or me in society, and every combination, and I went and recalled the book, fuck me, ten pages in, I'm not reading Lasch again. I consider it progress I didn't impulsively buy the book: anti-capitalism, motherfuckers. All I've got is empty gestures and screaming. So yes, it's a manic phase, spat out to make room for the one the follows the coming Dark phase. I go back and read what I wrote on a date in past years, a year from now, if we're still here, on Thanksgiving weekend 2017, rereading this weekend's posts will remind me, fuck me, just like reading last year's Thanksgiving weekend reminds me, fuck me.

• A recount for giant meteor.
• Not me, us: The identity politics that manifest during the election is premised on the continuation of capitalism, not its overturning. It is a liberal identity politics at odds with the long history of communist and socialist anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-colonialist struggle. Suppressing the history and present of radical black anti-capitalist struggle, of communist feminism, of the leading role of people of color in working class movements, the politics of identity functioned in the 2016 election to demolish rather than build solidarity. The missing subtext of the Democratic Party’s embrace of diversity was that its was a diversity of the successful, of the winners, of the multicultural celebrities and photogenic talented tenth who appear as so many talking heads on MSNBC. The Democratic substitution of entrepreneurs for workers under the guise of racial inclusion is class war, a war that leaves in its wake disproportionate numbers of black and brown bodies. White-washing the working class legitimizes policies that diminish the lives and futures of millions of working class people of color.
• Finding shit in the doorway: But the truth is, we don’t know. If all the predictions were so far off, why should we think the post-election analysis, with all its instant pseudo-certainty, is any smarter or more accurate? What do we know now that we didn’t know before, except that the story wasn’t what we thought it was and that it didn’t go where we thought it was going to go? I am not sure of anything right now, except that on the morning after the election there was a big piece of shit in a doorway and I didn’t know what it meant or how it got there, and that someone was going to have a wretched, smelly time trying to clean it up.
• A view from Britain: More important still, like Berlusconi he could present himself as a point of identification precisely because of his open contempt for the state, expressed in his unceasing effort to cut corners on taxes. Berlusconi sought complicity with Italians by winking at them: ‘I know you try to cheat, and so do I’; Trump did the same. His apparent lack of self-control probably came across as a mark of authenticity, and it was hugely entertaining: you never knew what might happen next. It’s an open question whether the taboo-breaking was spontaneous or not, but as with reality TV, what mattered was that it was dramatic and looked like a true expression of character. Trump’s revelation that as a businessman he gave money to every candidate and then called them to ask for favours isn’t so far from Yanis Varoufakis’s accounts of what really happens inside Eurogroup meetings. Who knows whether things really work like this? What matters is that the self-styled outsider confirms all our suspicions about what is wrong with the system. And even if we don’t like his ideas, we trust someone who lets us in on a secret.
• Obama and Standing Rock. This motherfucker. I feel like screaming.
• The Shillaries: The host of journalists, commentators, pundits, and celebrities who took it upon themselves day in and day out to explain, scrub, polish, promote, praise, defend, and sell Hillary as the best thing that could ever happen to our blessed country, because she had an endemic inability to do what politicians are supposed to do: sell themselves to the public. Presidential candidates, especially those with Clinton’s record-breaking funding base, can pay consultants to promote their ideas and promise. We don’t need journalists to volunteer to do it for them, and we sure as hell don’t need journalists who are taking on double-duty as PR flacks to further their own careers in the liberal punditocracy’s cursus honorum from lowly scribe to editor-writer at a highbrow magazine or earnest millennial channel to White House press secretary—or the C-suite at a Silicon Valley unicorn. RIP, my Shillaries.
• Melancholia after Castro.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Whitey on the Shmoon.
• Four new Clayton Eshleman poems.

IN VITRO/IN VIVO

Lucia Perillo

Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner

came to “first-aid training” at the fire station,

his slide carousel set up to eliminate

the easy pukers. The frog was not dead

but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens

when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle.

You wind up with something dead enough

to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide

as a cellophane sheet, which I did so

eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said:

Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua

gnawed through his stomach. Click.

Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo.

(I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click.

It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells

jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here

is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drano.

Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed

his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy

who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living,

which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact.

Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base

not the top of the skull and remember to turn down

the heat. Click. There are many people in this world

on whom nobody checks in very often. Click.

The warmer the room, the quicker a body

will turn black and bloat. Click.

If you have a dog it is important to leave out

what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food.

Click, click, then there was nothing

but a slab of light to signal he was through.

And it was then that I remembered the frog,

not that the coroner had spoken of frogs.

What he said was,

If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars,

that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.