One More Name Cut in the Scar of Your Tongue

2020 October 29

Pjoepf of Vriecyh

overdoseasily
Life in the Overdoseasilyocene
Jeff, stack firewood for me or don’t bother

 

• Almost everyone I know knows Joe Biden is evil but believes him less evil than Donald Trump and believes that revelations, cynically timed before the election (I mean, fucking god, just before the election!), however credible, revealing the depth of the Bidens' corruption, however minor and normal compared to the dumpster-fire evil of the Diaper King's, need be dismissed as propaganda when they can't be outright squelched as an honorable exercise in deceit in order to rid the country of the grosser evil
• I long ago stopped reading and following Greenwald or paying attention to the intermittent outbreaks of tboggian libsmears for and against him, and I have no doubt that Greenwald's decision to performatively quit Intercept *now* a shitty and self-serving move meant to garner maximum attention ahead of his next money-paying gig, but read a good take on Greenwald: The Goddamn Affair and Moon* on Intercept v Greenwald for a colossal reminder that there is no lesser-evilism between our shitlords' Yankees and Red Sox, just evil deployed differently for each teams' fanbase. 

1. Says the guy who happily wallows in his shitlord-provided bogs of cracker-hate
2. There are only two posts a year here not tagged My Complicity 
3. Fleabus photo two nights ago, bce
   
4. Not one poem in Poetry Foundation's archives uses "dumpster," the fuck?
   
5. The New OK: a view from Wisco 
6. The New Necessary: If this year has radicalized me, it has further radicalized me against the form of cruel capitalism we are sentenced to believing is the only reality. We all know it is unfair, unsustainable, and both exhausted and exhausting. The cycle of abuse that is referred to in addiction recovery is an appropriate metaphor for our systemic injustices and insanities — and part of my own difficult path this year has been acknowledging that I am more afraid of breaking my unhealthy patterns than I am of changing and actually feeling better.
7. Motherfucking pigs: Incredible thread: Philly police smashed out the windows of a car, snatched the kid that was sitting inside with his parents, then tweeted a photo of saying they'd found him lost on the street and that they're "the only thing standing between Order & Anarchy"
8. Divided against each other, united for the machine
9. Capitalism, the economy, the pandemic
10. A prediction: If 1) Donald Trump is elected to and serves a second term as president, and 2) the Democrats take control of the Senate, the Democrats will pass, and Trump will sign, a "Medicare For All" or other "single-payer" healthcare law.
11. Euthydemusian Bullshit
12. Screenshot poetics 
    
13. At Hasard
14. *Thanks to Charley and K for reminding me Moon is not Billmon 
15. An astonishing aggregating post and according to the bleggalaggregatinggaze possibly the last
    
16. Tepeyólotl 
17. Today's confession: I don't think The Lost Scrapbook all that, but if you want an eBook of it it's now available 
18. Seven syllables
    
19. bleggalaggreatinggaze
20. bless Serendipity
    
21. Bandcamping Autumn 2020
22. Franz Wright interview
23. I already found #18's CD but 
24. Zoviet Franz Wright would be a great band  
25. New Superchunk!
    
26. Early edition of Weekend forgotten CD's found on Jeff's shelves: 
    

ALCOHOL

Franz Wright

You do look a little ill.
But we can do something about that, now.
Can’t we.
The fact is you’re a shocking wreck.
Do you hear me.
You aren’t all alone.
And you could use some help today, packing in the dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and grinning with terror flowing over your legs through your fingers and hair . . .
I was always waiting, always here.
Know anyone else who can say that.
My advice to you is think of her for what she is: one more name cut in the scar of your tongue.
What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than harm, is not abject.”
Please.
Can we be leaving now.
We like bus trips, remember. Together
we could watch these winter fields slip past, and never care again,
think of it.
I don’t have to be anywhere.

We Tend to Be Apprehended Eventually, After a Futile But All the More Spirited Attempt at First Degree Self-Impersonation

• Poem with the above, clocktower at Hilltop last night
• Futile reminder: the constitution was written by and for shitlords
• In the NYRB and in the NYT, odes to pre-Trump innocence, the motherfucking idiots, a reminder that it's ALWAYS decorum, never policy
• Futile reminder: our shitlords know the easiest path to destroying Social Security is motherfucking Democrats
  
• Gnome ungnomes
  
• Orphic Sonnets, 1-10
• On the green brains that grow on trees around here
• Time for another Breece Pancake revival, I didn't enjoy most of the rural chic movement, think Raymond Carver one of the great frauds of American literature, but Pancake's stories slap, as the kids say
• Driving by the lake with John Ashbery (Ashbery's jibe at James Merrill worth the read by itself, it's perfect)
• My friend Duncan, you probably didn't click the youtube of him reading one of his poems a few posts back, edited a new anthology of dog poems, I did not know this until this morning!
  
• Serendipity: I finished Nicholson Baker's *The Anthologist,* a novel about a poet editing a poetry anthropology (among many things) two days ago
  
• New Eels
• New Mogwai
  
• Why isn't there a collected Franz Wright? 
• Fanny Howe interview
• On Gary Lutz, who I am reading currently, one story a week, a prodigious amount for someone who never has liked reading short stories, I mean at all, or at least for thirty-five years since being told over and over how great Raymond Carver's short stories are and having friends insist I read them and having read them hated them, each and every one of them, and damaged my ability to enjoy short stories ever since, fucking sad little sobby stories of sad sobby epiphanies and apostasies, The End 
• Confession: I love Lutz, fear picking up pace, overdose easily
  
• So a two serendipity day, I am blessed
  
• Woke up with Suicide in head 

IMAGO

Franz Wright

From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one. We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates, April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.

Floated from the Hearth Sparks Out of My Mouth

I'dv'e bet you a digital pint four months ago the Tuesday a week before Election Day ZANGED! 

McQueen is dead, long live McQueen

No. Do you think Trump knows? Is reading his obituaries?

The simpleton manifesto

My twitter feed tells me as I type this sentence SCOTUS done

Everybody has to draw a line: But you are betting a great deal for yourself and your family if you do not plan and draw red lines: at what point will you leave, if you can? At what point will you start preparing, however you can, to live in a plutocratic theocratic America, knowing it may not happen but that the cost of not preparing is higher than the cost of preparations?

Nothing in the constitution requires nine, the number has changed

Democracy, the musical

Nine will be the number when Harris loses to Hawley in 2024

Jeff types into his self-incriminating machine

The reason I think Trump done beyond my constant scotus yodel

After the digital tornado

Trump must know, Bibi oopsied the clue

Without a warrant

Punch me in the balls when Biden's inauguration speech yodels about reaching across the aisle if you still think this isn't a work

How He Changed Over Time: a new Lydia Davis story for our time (h/t Ed)

So this plan to consolidate past blogs I don't look at and no one is interested in into one huge blog no

UPDATE! 2020 October 27

On motherfucking Democrats: the surest sign Trump's been shitlorded is Biden winking at the shitlords

Jeff, if I don't want to deal with wordpress anymore and want to move pOj to blOOger just do it

Paul Kingsnorth? Anyone read?

Nothing halts me like some small vanity victory, every bad habit happily sloppily returns

50 Greatest Apocalyptic Novels

I write a poem like this. I asked twooter What would be the temperature today if Ginsberg hadn't died?

How societies go backwards

Now that Barrett in if there IS to be a Ratfucking for Trump it starts now

$$$EXPENSIVE MAGIC$$$

Cedar Sigo

 I stumble down        around torn peaks

                          “Fit the right suit

                                                      to trick them all.”

                                         the questions fall

                                   around allure. Poems floated

                           from the hearth

                                                sparks

                                 out the mouth. I am wound up, bored

we are only strangers on our way

the hotel                turned slender to mind

                now written out (sloppy)

                                                to music

                dark brown wood

                                 gold mirrors

                             (tight)

                                 The drinking songs from upper stories

drag us to sleep                 a bend in the basement wall

             unexplained

                              scorched. pulling on clean clothes

                  I let myself out

                                                              walk up

                                                                       underground

                                        to a far off hill

                                                             smoke on top

“The orchestra of the

                           immense magnified

       inner life

                   is now prodigious.”

the strings sound down

             make the surface of a mirror

                                                    & hang the head

                           my forbidden past

                                        Rose & Silk

           the wine is young

                                  The brooks still hum

                                                               with melted snow

Fame Makes Me Feel Lazy

I can't stop re-running in my head Trump's slump when Bibi refused payment on bill, kayfabe-breaker realizing his kayfabe's done broke, finished Nicholson Baker's *The Anthologist*, part one of Paul Chowder, it's weird about Baker and me, he's me - a more talented me - on the obsessively insistently seeking humor in a tube of toothpaste side, he finds funny what I do, it's like Murnane and me, it's that I already sorta write like Baker while thinking like he does but I don't write like Murnane (unless I'm reading Murnane at the time) though I think like *he* does, here's Fleabus two nights ago

• What free press?
  
• Republicans post-Trump
• Beware the return of the status quo
  
• Toxic masculinity
• Cosplaying crackers
• Against nostalgia
• Maggie's weekly links  
• Where do Moco's raked leaves go?  
• Washington DC and the quest for a perfectly square city
  
• Poetry Lessons from the Advanced in Age
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Out, Demons, Out! 
• John Berryman born 106 years ago today
  
• Roxy Music's *Siren* released 45 years ago yesterday 

 

DREAM SONG 133

John Berryman

     

As he grew famous - ah, but what is fame? -
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame - a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:

he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said - the charming Englishmen
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in his pub & livingroom
doing their duty, as too he did it,
but where are the delights

of long-for fame, unless fame makes him feel easy?
I am cold & weary, said Henry, fame makes me feel lazy,
yet I must do my best.
It doesn't matter, truly. It doesn't matter truly.
It seems to be solely a matter of continuing Henry
voicing & obsessed.

DREAM SONG 29

John Berryman

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart   

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time   

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry’s ears

the little cough somewhere, an odor, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind   

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,   

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;   

thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.   

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing.

DREAM SONG 105

John Berryman

As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone With the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No"
and we sat down with War & Peace.
   
As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious, 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'
  
Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr. Nixon,
whom I never liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.