Bargain Basement Giveaway of Clods and Scat and Cow Pies

Rest in Peace, Wayne Thiebaud

What few professors tip us busboys and dishwashers give me Amazon cards, I read all Percival Everett novels eventually and knew this came out October past and on the urgent recommendation of a friend last Friday I downloaded *The Trees* from my shitlord's orb to my shitlord's device and in five hours port-to-ported it

I don't do reviews, I'd only fuck it up for you, I offer you my vouch and shout myself kaboomed, the smartest and angriest and funniest and ouchiest and importantest and mirrorest and self-interrogatingest and brilliantest novel you've read since the last one, but I'm serious, do

I'm now a third into Joy Williams' *Harrow,* so far promising if not *The Trees* after a third-in already kaboom, I don't do reviews, I'd only fuck it up for you, what's important only to me: the ramification for Big Blue Bible, assuming I finish *Harrow,* MGM Sports Book, Dave Johnson will tell you in a WTOP radio ad before traffic and weather on the eights (and every other commercial break), gives me +125 on the Money Line to finish *Harrow,* and you can parlay that bet on whether I will finish Big Blue Bible (and if you don't think I'll finish it bet the over-under on the page I stop! Currently 425 with a hook)

Big Blue Bible be *Books of Jacob* by Olga Tokarczuk, a book to0 stomach-heavy for my brain to read front to back without sherbet intervals in the narrow daily windows I can read. I like it, mind, and will keep reading it since none of my obsolete reading prohibitions self-enforced any longer and I now permit myself to  come and go (see Marcel), understanding the main, not remembering the subtweets but enough echoes back to ingest the gist

But reading an extremely fast-paced and easily readable 288 page amazingly funny and vital and, um, harrowing novel in five hours, it's been years since I'd, 288 pages in Big Blue Bible will get me from Jesus Cracker's birthday to his deathday but only if the deathday is in April

Speaking of crackers, read Percival Everett's *The Trees,* the best novel about America I've read since the last and until the next

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The white bear problem and anti-racist training

I hate m**********ing Democrats

Reminder: Shitlords and criminals

Avedon Carol's occasional links

Maggie's weekly links

In praise of wasting time

{ feuilleton}'s weekend links}

What if *to Ashbery* were an infinitive?

The eighteen types of people on book twooter

What I just bought, and not from the shitlord

When Bill Callahan and Will Oldham cover Hank Williams Jr:

OUT OF METROPOLIS

Lynn Emanuel

We’re headed for empty-headedness,

the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,

states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.

We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart

of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool

oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses

with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;

we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over

ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow.

Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy

welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great

handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’

white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway

of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half

of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves

like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding

the whole great story together.

Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,

and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes

of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound

and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park

and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered

in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows.

The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance,

and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous

script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though

it were the author of this story.