No Elixir to Revive the Amputated Flower

• I've knotted myself reading again and now I can't read anything.
• I don't regret abandoning Powers, though I concede reading Powers within a day of finishing a Murnane novel diminished Powers' chances before I'd begun.
• Tried Enard's Compass: the page after page of references and allusions to 19th century history and music and literature, especially Central European history and music and literature, requires I research what I don't know to get a fuller picture of what Enard's attempting, and forgive me, no.
• On book table next to bed, Murnane's new book of collected short fictions (sic, it's what he calls them), I read "Stone Quarry" yesterday morning for breakfast, mind-melded.
• Mowed the lawn thinking of the fiction, drove Planet to airport thinking of the fiction.
• I will scan the fiction "Stone Quarry" into PDF on Monday and share with you if you ask.
• Back from airport, I pick up Murnane's new book of collected short fictions and thumb the pages, stop, it's the title fiction, "Stream System."
• I am a hypocrite, here is an allusion: the scene in Ishiguro's *The Unconsoled,* set in an unidentified Central European city, when Ryder is in the apartment of his childhood friend Fiona where Fiona has gathered friends who doubt Fiona's claims of knowing the famous Ryder.
• When Fiona asks Ryder to confirm their relationship Ryder bleats like a terrified just stuck pig.
• That's the sound "Stream System" made when I tried to read it.
• Since the butchering squeals I've not read anything printed on paper bound between two covers and won't until I reprocess "Stone Quarry" while hiking with Earthgirl shortly.
• I'd read Murnane in the 90s, long before my recent epiphany that he chimes my bells, which means I need think of this as more me and Murnane than Murnane and me.

• UPDATE! Olive.
• Complete destruction.
• My archives are open. Anyone interested could see ten years ago when I freely and frequently referred to crackers as crackers. One can leave one's tribe and still hate the abandoned tribe's enemy as much as before. The abandoned tribe's enemy is not the problem.
• The Left is not a church. Been seeing different strains of this of late.
• We dream each other's dreams.
• Hell ethic.
• Building prisons in Appalachia.
• Kill business schools.
• As I type this Washington's a-go-go re: a stand-up comedian's criticism of a paid propagandist's propagandizing, so fart as usual.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Old-timers here might remember BTC News - well, Weldon is blogging again.
• Whirling mechanical precision.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• All his whats are fucked. 
• Up at the top, old. No one asks if they are new or old, but for my sake I need mention when not new.
• Yesterday was Kim Gordon's 65th birthday.

THE SKY IS CLEAR, BUT IT'S RAINING

David Britton

Under the trees, where everything

Is still possible in prescribed doses:

Hundreds of accordion-like units

Without edges. But there is no unwinding

  

Of minutes to stay the execution

Of a rain-shot weekend in early

Beach weather, no elixir

To revive the amputated flower

  

Still kicking on its ghost-stem

In a bowl of water, no direction

In which to steer

The hapless, puzzled out-of-towner

  

Other than straight ahead,

To the sheer drop-off

Where his guidebook gutters

Or deposits him, addressless,

  

In thin air.