The Sane Unbenumbed Person Tongue-Tied, Sane with Gratitude and Terror

Old self-portrait, 2020, before the plague, from a time when canvases were tablets, reminded of it when struggling yesterday to keep my mouth shut and facial expression blank when a colleague at work expressed outrage at a video Trump released of Gaza as the Riviera of the Levant complete with shirtless Trump and Bibi on beach chairs drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas. Biden would never do this! he/she/they, outraged, barked, neglecting to cite the joe responsible for the destruction depicted at the beginning of the video, and it occurred to me that without these grids & hexjeffs my keeping my mouth shut and face straight an impossibility

The empire at its most honest
"Lawmakers in Alabama are expanding police immunity so that it's harder to sue cops for excessive force. The mask is off. Politicians want state-sanctioned violence to go unpunished. Everyone should be outraged about this. America is a fascist police state"
"Barack Obama signed $8.3 billion in cuts to SNAP. Dems didn't say a word. Joe Biden ended pandemic emergency measures resulting in 15 million Americans being thrown off Medicaid. Democrats silent. Again. The proposed cuts to SNAP and Medicaid by Republicans are draconian and inhumane. But if you're only speaking out when the GOP does it, and either ignore it or make excuses when Democrats do it, it's probably not Medicaid and SNAP you really care about"
Capital as Power in the 21st Century
"I Believe The World Is Ending - Does That Make Me Crazy?"
The Path to American Authoritarianism
"President of the United States posts video of him taking over Gaza with his statue for worship, dollars raining, Trump Gaza as centrepiece as he & Netanyahu chill at the beach. Ethnic cleansing rebranded as a real estate deal. Colonialist White Supremacist Zionism. Pure Evil"
⇧	"If you're old and slow like me, then that Trump Gaza video goes too quick to absorb its full insanity. So I took a few screenshots for you to digest at leisure. This is something genuinely posted by *the President of The United States Of America*.						⇧
The worldwide assault on working people
"Disgusting. I mean, the way a pile of pig offal or a bucket of chum or an overfull latrine is disgusting. The stench is permanent"
America First Deepens World Stagnation
⬇	"The Washington Post and LA Times editorial pages have gone full MAGA, MSNBC has purged all of its anti-Trump anchors, and Twitter is owned by a literal Nazi. Here's why liberal media bias is still a problem"						⬇
Bezos announces the Washington Post editorial page will exist solely to justify Bezos' shitlordly magnificence
⇧	"You might think Bezos is contradicting himself by declaring that all his minions must conform and support "personal liberties" on threat of expulsion. But for the US ruling classes, "liberty" has always meant "property", not "ideological freedom""						⇧
⇧	"Declaring that "personal liberties" are your north star in the same email where you're announcing that you're banning all views but your own from the newspaper is a helluva thing"						⇧
⇧	"Jeff, hi — now that the Washington Post oped page will become purely devoted to free markets, you should hire me to write about how Amazon's thousands of patents are a dangerous violation of free market principles"						⇧
"One reason (of many) that the very rich are "anti-government" is that they're not reliant on any govt services because they're rich. Courier services, private attorneys, private schools, cars and taxis, private playgrounds. In their minds "no one" uses public services, because no one they know does"
"Praise Jesus, we successfully voted to take food and healthcare from poor people to benefit the rich. Amen.”
"To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"This is not a political party right now. It is a country club for careerists who are happy to ride out the inferno in their luxury bunker"
Motherfucking Democrats hate you more than they hate magacrackers and it ain't even close
"We wanted to know how to make the Democratic party relevant again. So we talked to James Carville, Bill Maher, and Matt Yglesias"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
For shitlibs, it's not the genocide itself - who was the president that supplied the weapons and OKed the destruction depicted? Undersold, understated, denied genocide OK, tacky celebrated genocide icky. Shitlibs are shitty
(a) call them mercenaries and (b) the pigstool knows America has always employed mercenaries to do off-the-books wetwork so what he is calling for is on-the-books wetwork with all than implies both on-the-book and off in the future
"A major factor for why we are where we are is because for the last three decades, we’ve slopped up tons of movies and TV shows instilling the idea there are actually really cool billionaires and few if any about really cool forest rangers and VA staff"					Ubiquitous Evil
YES	Brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs
"the irony of receiving rape threats from zionists over an essay i wrote about zionists sexually assaulting people really does just speak for itself"
The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra)
The Supreme Court just gave scammers and robocallers the legal right to endlessly spam your phone and harass you
The decoupling of urban and rural America
"If we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists."
Maggie's		Today in Rhetorical Questions!
The Reliquary Translations (37, 38, 40, 43)
Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?
Things Brad Learned in the Fire: On the Destruction (and Rebirth) of a Bookstore
Elizabeth Bishop's grandparents					{ feuilleton }
There's a word for that			Percival Everett interview
Krasznahorkai interview					#1467 The long journey
Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate
Mark Ford on a new Anthony Hecht biography
NEW JENNY HVAL ALBUM IN MAY, NEW SONG NOW!
Autechre Announce North America and UK Tour					☞	They are playing Detroit the same week in October I'll be in Chelsea visiting my daughter and son-in-law, hmmm
NEW SWANS!					☞	Album out in May, no US tour dates as yet, new song	⬇

THE FACE

Franz Wright

Is there a single thing in nature

that can approach in mystery

the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   

its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   

by sights that ought to strike the sane   

unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   

with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   

at any given time: and if

you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   

they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you

with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile

the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   

preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   

one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   

or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,

to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

All the World Is Birthday Cake, or: Born Eighty-Two Years Ago Today

The best Beatles song is a George song:

The best Traveling Wilburys song is a George song:

My second most listened-to album of my life is a George album:

My favorite song ever is a George song:





I've always I loved George most, people can vouch:

And the Masked Man with His Chopper: We Know Him

This dumb review of Krasznahorkai's *Herscht 07769* has all the litfolk on xhitter who take photos of seven 1000 page novels stacked atop one another and xhit it out with the caption "Last week's reading" in a tizzy meaning some of it must yoink true, laugh
I am on page 223 of *Herscht 07769* but on hiatus since last Thursday
I loved the *Melancholy of Resistance* - *Satantango* - especially *War and War* and *Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming* tetrology and still VOUCH for them
At this moment in time I type this sentence the work and time and effort spent on reading *Herscht 07759* wasted work and time and effort
Granted my eyes are old and diseased, my memory degrading (it's frightening), I can nap for the first time in my life without waking up yellow so I can't read in bed like I did my whole life, I'm not reading any novel, any poetry, and expect to be consumed and rewarded for it now like once upon
Other old people tell me this is normal and not a personal failing, they aren't right but they're not wrong
I haven't dropped the *I am telling you three time we are being reprogrammed* gag in awhile, a choice, not my senility
Re: "I am telling you three times" - allusion to Vollmann's *Dying Grass* (how did Vollmann not make that guy's list of brodernists), my favorite novel, I've read it three times, I feel safe in betting pints there won't be a fourth							⇧
People - smart people - underestimate the number of and strength of the mind-bending side-effects of the constant whipsawing psyops shitlords feed us
I can't read if I'm compulsively building these grids because I start to read a novel and two pages in I've surrendered to the latest horrifying omens of clusterfuck contemplation which I don't notice with the novel until six pages later I don't remember reading
I never acquired the academic scaffolding I could have to be a professional OR amateur brodernist when I decided decades ago I didn't *want* academic scaffolding, I had the free ride to try but chose instead to spend time with my wife and child, but I hereby resign whatever pretentions and aspirations I had to become a brodernist (or pretend to be one on the internet), my head is too busy, too noisy, too fading trying to keep up with the clusterfuck for the busy noisy cinderblock novels I loved for fifty years, I need something as universally kaboom as a gloriously brodernist encyclopedic omfg novel and just as clusterfuckful but without the omfg, I have enough in real life
I'm back on the murnane, and I've ishiguro in the medicine cabinet too. I'll be OK
Tomorrow a BLCKDGRD Holy Day, hint							⇩

NO SPEECH FROM THE SCAFFOLD

Thom Gunn

There will be no speech from
the scaffold, the scene must
be its own commentary.

The glossy chipped
surface of the block is like
something for kitchen use.

And the masked man with his
chopper: we know him: he
works in a warehouse nearby.

Last, the prisoner, he
is pale, he walks through
the dewy grass, nodding

a goodbye to acquaintances.
There will be no speech. And we
have forgotten his offense.

What he did is, now,
immaterial. It is the
execution that matters, or,

rather, it is his conduct
as he rests there, while
he is still a human.