Now to Prod Us Toward the Past, Our Ruinous Nostalgias?

• Ambient Fleabus, two nights ago. 
• She has always purred, hard, barely audible to human ears. I can hear if I'm quiet.
• Snapshots from the early middle period of the Seven Years War.
• Ideology and the small c.
• Socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
• Watch the Birdie!
• Futile Weekend Blogging: I'll either add the traditional Sunday links this, another, or not.
• I used to like driving. 
• I have had more birds flipped at me in the two years since I started driving more kindly and just at or above the speed limit than I did in 40 years of being a 75 in a 65 driver.
• On Muriel Spark's centenary.
• Are we running out of poems?
• I love trance and drone more than ambient, but I love love love ambient.
• Lawrence English on Ambient Music at 40:

Ambient is a music of lived moments.

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Ambient recognizes control must be forgone with respect to how the music is encountered (but not how it is composed).

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Ambient is experientially discrete, but not musically so.

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Ambient acknowledges the deceit that is the promise of repetition.

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Ambient is never only music for escapism. It is a zone for participation in a pursuit of musical listenership that acknowledges sound’s potential values in broader spheres (the social, political, cultural etc). It is a freeing up, an opening out and a deepening, simultaneously.

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Ambient pulses; it courses. Rhythm is a rare friend to this music.

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Ambient is never only music. It is a confluence of sound, situation and listenership; moreover it’s an unspoken contract between the creator, listener and place, seeking to achieve a specific type of musical experience.

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Ambient is about the primacy of listening (for audience and creator). The music and the spaces and places (interior and exterior) it occupies are critical to how it is appreciated, understood and consumed.

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Ambient is transcendent but does not seek some higher plain. It is not new age music. Rather ambient music’s transcendence is within, and invites us deeper into the lived experience of the everyday.

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Ambient is never a documentation of somewhere or sometime. Instead it creates an individuated, impressionistic and imagined place. It is realized in-between our internal and external selves.

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Ambient is a music of perspectives. It is never fully knowable, in that the music seeps between perspectives (micro and macro) and dimensions of listening constantly. It maintains a sense of the eerie (as Mark Fisher noted).

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Ambient is friend to noise, to volume, to physicality. It is however, an enemy of uncalculated dynamism.

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Ambient is never finished. It is an experiential process of becoming – for listeners, for creators and more broadly as a musical philosophy.

Weldon Kees

Words Lolling Like Jetsam on the Lightless Bottom

• Past fortnight announcements of Farewell Tours for Elton John, Paul Simon, and Ozzy Osbourne.
• Excellent days for Farewell Tours, my generation's touchstones dying not in threes but sixes.
• I've one Paul Simon story involving the Graceland tour, but telling you would be cruft.
• Hamster can vouch, I think, both story and cruft; if he can't Earthgirl can, at least the story.
• Fuck me and my nostalgia.
• Posting less frequently both by and not by design, all's fine.
• On Cruft. There has always been cruft.
• Cruft is a deckhand's page-after-page zoological classification of all whales, cruft fuck it.
• I hereby declare ban on my rereading any book, short stories, novellas, novels, chapbook or book of poetry, until I read five somethings front-to-end I've never read before.
• Tom Sleigh's poem Day Room from where I stole this post's title.
• I never saw Elton John live by design and never will. 
• I saw Sabbath a couple of times both by and not by design at big stadium Summer festivals.
• I saw The Fall once, at the original 930 on F St in 1986.  
• Three hours of live The Fall recordings from Brian's show Tuesday.
• Fuck me and my nostalgia.

All Power Is Saved, Having No End

• Landru tweeted out about Prince tribute at Super Bowl. I typed in reply: Not snark. I can't conceive of anyone doing anything that would please anybody. Fine metaphors abound. and did not send.
• You're welcome.
• I do not know if there was a Prince tribute or not nor if there was if anyone was happy with it.
• Helmetball as Fine Metaphor Abounding.
• Taking it to the streets in America!
• Making you more dependent by convincing you you're buying independence is capitalism's best trick.
• Left Nostalgia.
• Daily Everybody Sucks.
• Three colours and a hue.
• What is the last question?
• For instance: Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The significance of the number eight in Blood Meridian.'
• Don DeLillo v Chicken Nuggets w/r/t Pynchonian Errata and Synchronicity. (h/t davidly).
• Rukeyser's Book of the Dead being rereleased!
• I can front you a PDF if you ask nice and I like you.
• Title poem: Book of the Dead.
• Have I mentioned there's new Richard Youngs?

THE DAM

Murial Rukeyser

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises

in the green season, in the sudden season

the white the budded

                                             and the lost.

Water celebrates, yielding continually

sheeted and fast in its overfall

slips down the rock, evades the pillars

building its colonnades, repairs

in stream and standing wave

retains its seaward green

broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet

spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white.

White brilliant function of the land’s disease.

   

Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under

concrete arches and the channeled hills,

turns in the gorge toward its release;

kinetic and controlled, the sluice

urging the hollow, the thunder,

the major climax

                                   energy

total and open watercourse

praising the spillway, fiery glaze,

crackle of light, cleanest velocity

flooding, the moulded force.

   

                    I open out a way over the water

                    I form a path between the Combatants:

                    Grant that I sail down like a living bird,

                    power over the fields and Pool of Fire.

                    Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world.

      

Diverted water, the fern and fuming white

ascend in mist of continuous diffusion.

Rivers are turning inside their mountains,

streams line the stone, rest at the overflow

lake and in lanes of pliant color lie.

Blessing of this innumerable silver,

printed in silver, images of stone

walk on a screen of falling water

in film-silver in continual change

recurring colored, plunging with the wave.

     

Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers.

The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west,

the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed.

Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset,

the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment,

hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under

the moist and fragile galleries of stone,

mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall,

the quick light fall, years of white cities fall,

flood that this valley built falls slipping down

the green turn in the river’s green.

Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky.

     

     How many feet of whirlpools?

     What is a year in terms of falling water?

     Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities.

     Continuity: Σ Q = 0

     Equations for falling water. The streaming motion.

     The balance-sheet of energy that flows

     passing along its infinite barrier.

     

     It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,

     runs through electric wires;

     it comes, warning the night,

     running among these rigid hills,

     a single force to waken our eyes.

     

     They poured the concrete and the columns stood,

     laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel,

     a dam for monument was what they hammered home.

     Blasted, and stocks went up;

     insured the base,

     and limousines

     wrote their own graphs upon

     roadbed and lifeline.

     

Their hands touched mastery:

wait for defense, solid across the world.

Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.”

Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the

     methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke-

     teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the

     information on them.

Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the

     most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the

     paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these

     victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come

     within my knowledge.

Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide

     & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had

     better take this question up in a private conference.

The dam is safe. A scene of power.

The dam is the father of the tunnel.

This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining.

                                                                                                                                                          

                            Stock and                

                          Dividend in                                                                 Net             Closing        

   High  Low            Dollars                   Open   High   Low    Last   Chge.   Bid    Ask    Sales 

    111   61 ¼  Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼   69 ½  67 ¼  69 ½   +3     69 ¼  69 ½ 3 ,400

                                                                                                                                                                 

                         

The dam is used when the tunnel is used.

The men and the water are never idle,

have definitions.

This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours,

surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest,

willing to run forever to find its peace

in equal seas in currents of still glass.

Effects of friction : to fight and pass again,

learning its power, conquering boundaries,

able to rise blind in revolts of tide,

broken and sacrificed to flow resumed.

Collecting eternally power. Spender of power,

torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments,

million, its power can rest and rise forever,

wait and be flexible. Be born again.

Nothing is lost, even among the wars,

imperfect flow, confusion of force.

It will rise. These are the phases of its face.

It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden.

It changes. It does not die.