Thursday, December 2, 2021

Leftover Carats of Tar in the Gutter

Of course I started Books of Jacob just to hold the book as object and book as book in hand and each because required reading and like almost every novel I start I caution myself I'm liking it too much and let's see tomorrow but this one's roots' depths so evident already I do not regret winning my bet against myself I would start it, I'd break the paperback spine except for that jinxing part when combined with this jinxing part jinxes exponentially

I picked another fight with borth nethesdans (click comments), this I confess a favorite obsession, much more powerful than recreational loathing of porth notomac which is half Rockville, two fifths Gaithersburg, one fifth Darnestown, they despise and resent a new map that clusters them with Silver Springers and - here's the outrage - Takoma Parkers

We entered east moco on Norbeck Road, MD 28, weeks ago, I wrote about MD 28 (and other mocoroads) years ago, we walked the Underground Railroad Trail, trailhead where Layhill turns turns into Ednor crossing Norwood, saw *the* Sandy Spring, east moco *all* USPS-called Silver Spring, I can't argue a moco neighborhood name in good faith east of Georgia Avenue

Books of Jacob may amaze me but I'll not get four-fifths of the religious allusions and references in a book that will be interrogating Torah and Koran and Bible and each's adherents' relationships to the others, don't get me wrong, this is a reason to read it, I hope the five-fifths on helmetball teams and glee clubs teaches me something much smarter than dumb I am, I'll get the part about zealotry





Rest in Peace, Alvin Lucier
Happiest place on Earth: Hitler, Disney, covid
"There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people"
They will never fuck off to the sea
The Modern Monetary Trick
Rich white people know they would win a race war but lose a class war
On the edge of the body
Avedon Carol's occasional links
There is nothing more borth nethesdan than f*****g borth nethesdan anger at being clustered with Silver Spring, the fucks
Crane's *The Five White Mice*
Scott played a Lucier tribute set yesterday




TAR

C.K. Williams

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

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