and saw I was making a fatal mistake, that's the poem, but went through with it anyway

I take two of these and glue them back to back, upside-down to the other, to create fidgets and laminate them so the fountain pen ink I use in the washes along with watercolor ink and watercolor and chalk and gouache don't rub off on fingers fidgeting the fidgets and gave three to my daughter and three to my son-in-law and two to my wife for giftmas, the first ever held and seen in real life by anyone but me as opposed to viewed on this blog or that blog, what this augers I hope is nothing more than more might be seen in real life 364 days from now

All self-portraits of course, head-shots and hexes and metaphors and jinxes. I have no illusions of their worth beyond I'd rather make these than make haikus at this moment, and I laugh when catching myself watching washes dry, if I ever pored over a poem I wrote like I pore over these it's been at least a decade

But I am reading fiction again, you self-jinxing motherfucker, Jeff. Finished the first two books of Fosse's *Septology,* picked up after reading a Fosse interview in which he said he likes Murnane (and is translating Murnane into Fosse's native Norwegian) and thinks they both share similar themes and obsessions and tactics and yes, and yes, it's pinging, will read three four five and six. Reading Sorokin's *Telluria* and Cărtărescu's *Solenoid,* in and out, front to back but not start to finish, translations from Norwegian and Russian and Romanian, not consciously not reading novels whose mother tongue is English but not surprised I arrived here, I get enough fiction about America from blogrolls alone. Poetry, mother tongue only, forgive me, please? yes, third time through Diane Seuss' *Frank: Sonnets,* (published in 2021 but discovered in 2022), it's one of many reasons why my poetry drought, *I* can't (few can) like Seuss can, if you ask nice and I like you let me send you a copy, email top left of blogroll. Music? My favorite song from 2022

No announcement, no bleggalgaze, no manifesto, just a new strange place I'm enjoying, you self-jinxing motherfucker, Jeff
Can dogs smell time? Ask Donut the Dog!
Seven theses on American politics
A vertiginously unbalanced form of hegemony
The evil that is central to unchecked capitalism
What lurks in Google's Black Box ads empire?
Living like a deer and learning from the birds
Not just climate change, ecological collapse
Xmas 2022, or: The Artificial Oath
Humanity's long war against darkness
Radical dimensions				Trump *must* know he's dead meat
Trump *must* know he's dead meat				Trump *must* know he's dead meat
Today in Duh: *Shitlords* wreck the supply chain for profit!
Marxist analysis of Giftmas				United States of Assholes
How did Cormac McCarthy become a shill for libertarian utopianism?
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				PHILOSOPHOSOPHY
Our first Midwinter Day w/o Bernadette Mayer
The voice and tragicomic soul of The Specials
Triptych from *Stripper Disintergration*
It won't surprise anyone who knows me my favorite album of 2022 is:

[THERE IS A CERTAIN STATE OF GRACE...]

Diane Seuss

There is a certain state of grace that is not loving.
Music, Kurt says, is not a language, though people
say it is. Even poetry, though built from words,
is not a language, the words are the lacy gown,
the something else is the bride who can’t be factored
down even to her flesh and bones. I wore my own
white dress, my hair a certain way, and looked into
the mirror to get my smile right and then into my own
eyes, it’s rare to really look, and saw I was making
a fatal mistake, that’s the poem, but went through
with it anyway, that’s the music, spent years in
a graceful detachment, now silence is my lover, it does
not embrace me when I wake, or it does, but its embrace
is neutral, like God, or Switzerland since 1815.