- DC United upyuppied yesterday.
- I quit these motherfuckers long ago in a concrete stadium far away from now and when we never thought they'd get a new stadium
- though we knew they wanted to be these motherfuckers.
- 20 years to biblical apocalypse.
- This thread.
- Making money by fining the poor.
- There is no better metaphor for motherfucking America than motherfucking helmetball.
- Jim's backyard.
- Two days ago was Robert Duncan's centenary, once upon he (and the other forgotten Robert, Bly) were giants.
- Fleabus, though not yet feeble, now unmistakably geriatric.
- There's a kabong new Guided by Voices song!
POETRY, A NATURAL THING
Robert Duncan
Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
and died
just like they do every year
on the rocks.”
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.
This beauty is an inner persistence
toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,
a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world
primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring,
salmon not in the well where the
hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,
blindly making it.
This is one picture apt for the mind.
A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year’s extravagant antlers
lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears
new antler-buds,
the same,
“a little heavy, a little contrived”,
his only beauty to be
all moose.
0)that's a good-looking cat
ReplyDelete1)this is interesting -
An economist explains what digital technology means for the future of popular culture -
Digital renaissance?
By Angela Chen
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18168457/digital-renaissance-joel-waldfogel-music-books-movies-television-technology-interview
speaking of moose, and of duck-like behaviors
ReplyDeleteLike A Scarf
The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing,
more likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I asked one of the doctors for a corkscrew
he produced one without a moment's hesitation.
And it was a corkscrew of the finest craftsmanship,
very shiny and bright not unlike the doctor himself.
'We'll be conducting our picnic under the great oak
beginning in just a few minutes, and if you'd care
to join us we'd be most honored. However, I understand
you have your obligations and responsibilities,
and if you would prefer to simply visit with us
from time to time, between patients, our invitation
is nothing if not flexible. And, we shan't be the least slighted
or offended in any way if, due to your heavy load,
we are altogether deprived of the pleasure
of exchanging a few anecdotes, regarding the mentally ill,
depraved, diseased, the purely knavish, you in your bughouse,
if you'll pardon my vernacular, O yes, and we in our crackbrain
daily rounds, there are so many gone potty everywhere we roam,
not to mention in one's own home, dead moonstruck.
Well, well, indeed we would have many notes to compare
if you could find the time to join us after your injections.'
My invitation was spoken in the evenest tones,
but midway through it I began to suspect I was addressing
an imposter. I returned the corkscrew in a nonthreatening manner.
What, for instance, I asked myself, would a doctor, a doctor of the mind,
be doing with a corkscrew in his pocket?
This was a very sick man, one might even say dangerous.
I began moving away cautiously, never taking my eyes off of him.
His right eyelid was twitching guiltily, or at least anxiously,
and his smock flapping slightly in the wind.
Several members of our party were mingling with the nurses
down by the duck pond, and my grip on the situation
was loosening, the planks in my picnic platform were rotting.
I was thinking about the potato salad in an unstable environment.
A weeping spell was about to overtake me.
I was very close to howling and gnashing the gladiola.
I noticed the great calm of the clouds overhead.
And below, several nurses appeared to me in need of nursing.
The psychopaths were stirring from their naps,
I should say, their postprandial slumbers.
They were lumbering through the pines like inordinately sad moose.
Who could eat liverwurst at a time like this?
But, then again, what's a picnic without pathos?
Lacking a way home, I adjusted the flap in my head and duck-walked
down to the pond and into the pond and began gliding
around in circles, quacking, quacking like a scarf.
Inside the belly of that image I began
recycling like a sorry whim, sincerest regrets
are always best.
James Tate
https://www.wikiart.org/en/george-stubbs/the-moose
ReplyDeletePARABLES OF THE POWERFUL AND THEIR PAWNS
ReplyDeleteJames Tate
The Wild Cheese
A head of cheese raised by wolves
or mushrooms
recently rolled into
the village, it
could neither talk nor
walk upright.
Small snarling boys ran
circles around it;
and just as they began
throwing stones, the Mayor
appeared and dispersed them.
He took the poor ignorant
head of cheese home,
and his wife scrubbed it
all afternoon before
cutting it with a knife
and serving it after dinner.
The guests were delighted
and exclaimed far into the night,
"That certainly was a wild cheese!"
A passage from The Dermis Probe
Idries Shah
Several small boys were playing.
They were throwing. from hand to hand,
a squirrel which they had caught,
and whose feet they had bound together.
As they ran here and there, they roared with laughter,
excitement and pleasure on every face.
After a few moments an older youth,
seeing what they were doing,
ran up to them from the roadside.
He took the animal and removed the cord from its paws, and let it go.
The players of the squirrel-game were furiously angry now,
and shouted all sorts of abuse at the older boy.
a group of small boys appears in both accounts; the title character is a wild cheese in one, a squirrel in the other; the mayor in the first account initially plays a role similar to that of the older boy in the story of the squirrel; the squirrel resumes an unfettered life, but the wild cheese meets a different fate
in the interests of emphasizing the parallelism of narratives about the wild cheese and the squirrel, i decontextualized the latter
ReplyDeletein shah's book the anecdote is preceded by a discussion between two spiritual directors, in which one asks the other why he forbids certain seemingly-innocent pastimes - the latter says, "notice what is happening here - it will give you your answer"
later the former said,
Had it not been for this demonstration, I am sure I would never have realized the relative situation and concealed dangers in what we assume to be legitimate pleasure. But ever since then, throughout my life, I have often found what appears to be desirable is being done at the expense of something else; and that what pleases people, even 'sincere' people, can be found to be making an appetite for an unsuspected vice.