- George for New Years one of my favorite Egoslavian traditions
- Egoslavian New Years tradition: I've moved a dozen and a half hibernating or comatose from living blogrolls to bottom cemetery, if your blog is dormant it still exists here, if your blog now touts stocks in Chinese or erectile dysfunction pills in English you're gone
- cemeteries exist so I see you when your zombie ass wakes up
- If you are Kinding me but me not you please let me know
- If there is someone, someplace, you think I should see please let me know
- When I started a new post in 2019 I saved it as a draft with the day's date converted to 2029, I deleted most but I'm certain there are some I missed, shit bombs for when I am 70, 69, 68, 67...
- Thank you, Beloveds and regulars and frequenters and once-in-awhilers and first-timers, life still exists in Dead Blegsylvania
POEM AT THE NEW YEAR
John Ashbery
Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,
that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other
principles prevail in this glum haven, don't they? If that's what it is.
Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the dropp was
on the burr I know not. I come all
packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things.
I wonder about Australia. Is it anything about Canada?
Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete
the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system?
Can we trust others to indict us
who see us only in the evening rush hour,
and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you,
my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center.
At least that's how it feels to me.
I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you waited in line for things, and the stained light was
impenitent. 'Spiky' was one adjective that came to mind,
yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.
Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke
in cafés, and outside the great ashen bird
streamed from lettered display windows, and waited
a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.
wondering about australia and canada, as ashbery does - one important difference between the two regarding the relationship between the original inhabitants and the settlers is that in canada there were important trade relationships prior to the mass movement of european agriculturalists to the territory - canadian novelist and political political philosopher john raulston saul sees the relationship and interactions of the first nations peoples, the french, and the english as having shaped the canadian national character - see the wikipedia article about him
ReplyDeletealso mentioned there - his picaresque novel dark diversions, about which amazon states
With savage wit, John Ralston Saul creates a world where intrigue, prestige and debauchery span continents and social milieux ... staging a black comedy of international proportions that takes the reader from New York to Paris to Morocco to Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s. When he’s not encountering dictators in Third World hot spots, Saul’s narrator moves in privileged circles on both sides of the Atlantic, insinuating himself into the lives of well-to-do aristocrats. Through his exploits we experience a fascinating world of secret lovers, exiled princesses, death by veganism, and religious heresies. The emotional fireworks of these inhabitants of the First World are sharply juxtaposed with the political infighting of the dictators and the corruption, double-dealing, and fawning that attend them. But as he becomes further enmeshed in these worlds, his outsider status grows more ambiguous: Is he a documentarian of privileged foibles and fundamental inequity, or an embodiment of the very “dark diversions” he chronicles?
and speaking of time's flow -
ReplyDeleteAs The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs says, “birds are dinosaurs in the same way that bats are mammals.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/what-were-dinosaurs-for/
This is cheery:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.wunderground.com/article/news/climate/news/2020-01-02-daily-weather-reveals-global-fingerprint-climate-change