Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus

• What if Ginsberg hadn't died and shitlords hadn't cemented at least two decades of pig-guaranteed Supreme Court corporate protection?
• Today is October 17, 2020, the election eighteen days away, it's a foregone conclusion Trump will lose at the timestamp I post this
  
• What would October 17, 2020 be if RBG alive, our shitlords' at least two decades of Supreme Court protection *not* guaranteed?
• Would you trade Ginsberg's life for Trump's defeat?
  
• No, I don't think our shitlords poisoned Ginsberg, I do think her death removed Trump's only remaining value to our shitlords and changed our shitlords' plans for October 
• Dems delivered, as reward for service and with trust Dems will grift within acceptable boundaries let Dems suck the faucet first in full first for two years, half-jones next two years while shitlords consolidate gains ahead of 2024's cracker restoration
  
• If you'd bet me digital pints October 2020 would be the most boring of this potuscycle I'd owe you digital pints
• Two Bob's birthday yesterday, Weir's 73rd, Mould's 60th
  

 

• Shit changes, of course, kabooms can still happen, but my digital pints are on Ginsberg's death as the single most determining event in this potuscycle
  
• Who elected Donald Trump
• Dogshit Presidents
• Motherfucking Democrats
  
• Crackerpigs
  
• What do you know about yourself? 
• Oh my sweet imaginary friend Cracker Jesus, are you OK?
• Caste: the origin of our discontents
  
• Kill your gas stove
• Holding your grandparents' kettle (remember when Goldsmith was half of Songs for Aging Children, mocomofos?)  
• Because God did not relax: on the reissue of Gaddis' *Recognitions* and *JR*
• I woke up with Spicer in my head
  

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.

I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

Pouring water. Shedding it

Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

Driving the hills crazy,

A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

Or down in the city where the peach trees

Are awkward as young horses,

And there are kites caught on the wires

Up above the street lamps,

And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

As slow getting started

As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

After a lot of unusual rain

California seems long in the summer.

I would like to write a poem as long as California

And as slow as a summer.

Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

As the very tip of summer.

As slow as the summer seems

On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

Between Bakersfield and Hell

Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

Traveling up and down her skin

Long empty highways

With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.

I am thinking that her body could be California

And I a rich Eastern tourist

Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

That I have never seen.

Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

Send them.

One of each breast photographed looking

Like curious national monuments,

One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem

Will be repeated. How many summers

Will torture California

Until the damned maps burn

Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses

The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

More Than the Ear Can Hold

 Want to DJ one hour on WFMU?

What kinds of show ideas are we interested in?
-Underrepresented music on WFMU: new and old artists that haven't received the proper kind of attention on our airwaves yet
-Uncategorizable strangeness
-Spoken word collages
-Spontaneous radio improvisation
-Labored sound art pieces made just for your radio show
-Interviews with scientists, obscure radio personalities, your parents ...
-Comedy
-Found sound, field recordings, etc.

Me, no. Two, three, four, five years back I briefly talked with someone at WOWD in Takoma Park about possibly DJing a show, I don't want to DJ a show beyond the one at this shitty blog, but you? some of you?

This all started after reading Ira's interview on tone view (in which he discusses, among many things, his WFMU weekly show), which means today's playlist is songs by one of the bands on the innermost circle of rotating bands/musicians for the three not permanent chairs in My Stupidass Deserted Island Five Game

 

 

• These efforts: These fuckers really not understand that Democrats are their allies, that Democrats are the Washington Generals?
  
• Reminder: The wife of a Supreme Court justice "is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington," and "is really the tip of the spear in these efforts."
• Reminder: Democrats suppressed the vote in Wisconsin to hurt Sanders
  
• Reminder: a nominee to the Supreme Court's father was a top lawyer for an oil company whose case will be heard at the Supreme Court (and the Washington Generals did not ask her about it much less ask her if she will recuse herself)
  
• Perry Anderson on Britain's, and ours, clusterfuck
• Update: I made this tonight 
  
• Deserted islands and radical needs
• My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, the two permanent seats remain permanent though I don't want to listen to either until the requisite birthday posts feel horribly obligatory, the fuck is wrong with me

 

 

• Liberalism and fascism, partners in crime
• I am sure Senator Crackerwhisperer from Texas and Senator Crackerwhisperer from Missouri (who is going to be a boil on America's ass for decades, provided there are decades) are just as livid at this censorship 
• Tech companies are destroying Democracy, Jeff types into his free google blogging platform
  
• Free speech, the concept, is disinformation itself
  
• The good parts
• Iron laws of institutions, a Pelosi reminder
• War on universities
  
• Dan's New Critical Compilation
• My giftmas present to me will be Berryman's letters
• Eileen Miles *Oath*
• James McNew interview
  
  

Frank O'Hara

Of Course It Was a Disaster

• I increased the font size on my laptop* (and dimmed the lights) because side effect number two of working from home, my eyes
• I have not changed the seethings on this bleg though it occurs to me I change sentences to fit the square of blaager's current seethings which I now can't if I don't turn the current seethings into obsolete seethings and no, me dumb setting motherfucker, I call this clusterfuck not fake but the best fake farted, yes? anything that happens now nuke Tehran or lay siege to Grand Rapids I have been always was will always be not a wrong barometer
  
• (*that won't turn off until it shuts itself off when I don't want it to then won't turn back on when I want it to)
• Working, the bigger font, the dimmer light
  

• Someone in his later years spends cold rainy nights inside more and more
• White cough genocide
• Shitlords don't give a scotusfuck about abortion
• Shitlordia
• Machiavelli
• Shitlords don't give a scotusfuck about abortion  
• Democrats don't give a fuck about winning, it's in their job description
• Daily obamapostasy, the fucker
• The radical mysticism of identitarian reductionism
• Choosing corporate rule, he types into his free google blogging platform
• A nation of walls
• NYT failing its readers
• Kootchie Towers, p3, c4
• The Milky Way
• Ranking Bethesda's public parking garages  
• Side effect one of working from home is sitting all day on my fat ass
• When Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy cover Cat Stevens

GOING THERE

Jack Gilbert

Of course it was a disaster.

That unbearable, dearest secret

has always been a disaster.

The danger when we try to leave.

Going over and over afterward

what we should have done

instead of what we did.

But for those short times

we seemed to be alive. Misled,

misused, lied to and cheated,

certainly. Still, for that

little while, we visited

our possible life.

Jonesing That Comes at the End of Desire?

Weird lull, yes? no something so o my fucking god you'll forget day after tomorrow for the next o my fucking god in what, 48 hours? jonesing

I had cause to think of one of my all-time favorite albums and this, one of my favorite songs ever, maybe my favorite tripping my brains out song ever (I'm game, yo, turn me on, dead man)

 

• The silence of pro-lifers
• $omething'$ mi$$ing in thi$ analy$i$
  
• In a world of gutterals
  
• Political economy after neoliberalism
• Feudal exploitation
  
• Nihilism at bay
• Destroying public education one plague at a time 
  
• A person wrote a book called Why We Need a New Green Deal then asked this question on twitter: Cannot for the life of me understand why Democrats still parrot the idea that fracking is a booming economic powerhouse instead of an unprofitable house of glass built on lies and cheap debt that's imploding in real time and laying off tens of thousands of people in the process
  
• Motherfucking liberals

• Universities in crisis
• Do Christians believe their own myths? 
• New England's forests are sick
  
• I don't want to live in Michigan 
• Crackerstani rage
  
• I'm glad I don't live in Pennsylvania 
• Crackerstani cops
  
• Maggie's weekly links 
  
• Happiness 2020
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 

BETWEEN HERE & THERE

Dana Ward

I.

 

Let me speak with expressive

 

hesitation & a feeling for

 

interment why even

 

lineate what isn’t broken by

 

music let me speak with

 

inextricable reluctance.

 

I want to tear the heart

 

from refused convalescence

 

& feed it those long fronds

 

of river bed grass. I want to

 

tear the heart out of style

 

& put it between

 

utter thrall & the infancy

 

of all things impure.

 

Torn out, a flame thickens

 

between us as if

 

not right now we’ll be

 

ripped from this life

 

or each other a white

 

lie not a little more tender

 

than quick. Inextricable

 

reluctance to die or even

 

leave youth culture ever.

 

What a stupid feeling.

 

Do you think it isn’t

 

true? The very existence

 

of flame throwers proves

 

that sometime, somewhere,

 

someone said to themselves

 

‘You know I want to

 

set those people over there

 

on fire but I’m just not

 

close enough to get the

 

job done.’ Someone

 

puts their arms around you

 

in the cold. There’s an al-

 

most disquieting closeness

 

as gossamer clots &

 

becomes an impasto derivative

 

of some newly visible

 

interdependence. Flame

 

throwers then are just

 

a description of prevailing

 

ideology, relics, the life

 

of the party, a soul

 

flirts by burning

 

that name for itself

 

up in jonesing that comes

 

at the end of desire?

 

Well I wouldn’t know

 

about that. A little

 

goat. Why would it

 

nuzzle dreamily up

 

the way I nuzzle dreamily

 

up to my knees. In the

 

‘fatal position’ as my

 

nephew used to call it

 

estranged from play

 

waiting on the fox hunt.

 

Oh baby

 

it beats up my lips

 

the somatic effects

 

of contriving a psychic

 

blockade against death

 

with the contours of your

 

face & healing

 

in constant eclipse

 

where all things

 

inextricably broken by

 

music make the basic

 

rhythmic unit go

 

something like this — I

 

don’t want to loose you. I

 

don’t want to be

 

empty, clever hold &

 

keep you. I was lost

 

to you to start with still

 

I keep on coming back.

 

Do you think you’ll

 

keep on coming back to me

 

forever? That’s the meaning

 

of our life together

 

baby.