the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band

• New Magnetic Fields, my favorite of the few new 50 I've heard, release in March.
• Four theories on the unscheduled and until last Friday unnoticed cessation of scribbling in tablets, all of which suggest scribbling in tablets is precisely what I need doing:

1. The fate of kayfabe in a world of fake leaves me ink-tied: how to write in a world without kayfabe?
2. I still have not rid myself of my indoctrinated faith in the human capability to survive its assholes and waver between futile anger and tongue-tied humor.
3. Like everyone else, I can't get past assigning blame in the micro for the current clusterfuck even while this clusterfuck, macro, ahead of schedule, yes, was inevitable.
4. I am obsolete, as are pencils and paper, as are fine metaphors abounding.

• I typed this joke HERE in the context of this post: fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man, Buck Turgidson said, in his Grammy winning role of Patton in the American classic, Stroke Me.
• I would never have written that joke in tablet, I would have put pen down, turned to laptop, the saved to 2018 draft (I haven't fucked that up in months, I think), and typed the joke there, for you (to admire my range).

• The Father, the Son, the Holy Shitstorm. 
• Election 2020 predictions.
• On making them look like victims.
• The Monument Wars.
• Writing and memory.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Field recording as respite from the world.
• 50 Years Ago in Grateful Dead.
• Tom Raworth, RIP.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Tom Raworth

1. gone to lunch back in five minutes
  

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

it is a long coat and a van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes    the arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam
                

2. walking my back home
                   

the wind

is the wind

is a no-vo-cain band

and the footstep

                          echoes

i

have conjured people
                          

3. ah, it all falls into place
  

when it was time what he had left became a tile

bodies held shaped by the pressure of air

were clipped to his attention by their gestures

my but we do have powerful muscles

each of us equal to gravity

or sunlight that forces our shadows

into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle
                   

4. good morning he whispered
  

the horrors of the horses are the crows

the bird flies past the outside the library

many heels have trapped the same way

he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees

check the pattern swerves with the back

the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings

aloft the hand removes a book and checked it

for death by glasses or the angle food descends
   

5. the broadcast
   

she turns me on she turns on me

that the view from the window is a lake

and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat

of the library    the grass outside goes brown

in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct

thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks