The Walls of Jeff’s Villa Resonate With the Intermittent, Migraine-Like Drone of Motorized Gondolas and the Distant Murmur of Cats

Flem Snopes just married the pregnant-but-not-with-his-kid Eula Varner, the fuck am I doing in Yoknapatawpha County at the turn of the 20th century? I'd forgotten Faulkner can be laugh-out-loud funny. When I'm not there I'm in Acadian Canada in the mid-seventeenth century witnessing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans (though, in a typical if vital Vollmann digression, I just spent 50 pages with Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in sixteenth century Spain before his beatification), the fuck am I doing there? and when I'm not there I'm in David Ohle's Pisstown, I know what I'm doing here. I'm grateful that I'm reading and reading well: I've failed a dozen novels, old and new, first reads and rereads, in the past six months, I blame me





Strangest days of my life. Reflexive tick: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, the Earth will be here but will the world? The Faulkner, Vollmann, Ohle novels, the lust for power by assholes is a major theme, it occurs to me that humans would have destroyed the world already if they only had the means, and now that they have the means and the end seems unstoppably inevitable I don't want to read fiction about assholes set in today. Why this is reassuring to me - that humans are no worse than ever they just have the means to enact greater and greater assholosity - is, at best, a coping mechanism that offsets my compulsive documentation of said current assholosity. Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop our immiseration and extinction is evaporating exponentially faster by the second. How 'bout that hockey game, huh?





I actually wanted to bump the George birthday post from the top, fuck me. Music too, sounds I once loved unto never conceiving I'd not only not mind not hearing them for a very long time if not ever fucking again are increasing with clusterfuck's swelling and deepening. I listened to *All Things Must Pass* past Tuesday after posting the birthday, at first I vibrated like always but by "Wah Wah," gone; was horrified but unsurprised. I won't truly worry about my head until hiking with L and playing disc golf suck and being finally incapable of reading anything or listening to anything (I've long since stopped watching anything), but my head is changing, not all for the bad but most, and it's not just aging towards my skeleton days. Yes, I changed the name in the title of this post from the name in the Ashbery poem the title comes from. Ashbery still works for me





Éliane Radigue died this week. If you look at my bandcamp page you'd see some of her music and many artists I would not be listening to now if I hadn't discovered Radigue decades ago. My current immersion (to L's annoyance when she's in my car) in ambience and drone and noise directly related to her seminal music. I've been listening constantly since news of her death. Radigue's music still makes me vibrate and vibrate more resonantly than ever, I'm (almost more relieved than) delighted to report. Need some of the toeholds to my past, yinz

Western Elites Are Making A Play For Eternal Oligarchy
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
"Every fascism has its suhumans. To technofascists, humans are the subhumans"				The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys
Elite psychopathy, mutual blackmail, and the bleeding edge of power
Shoddy People: The redemption of disgrace
On the Motherfucking Democratic Party Style
DCCC Rakes in Millions From Palantir Lobbyists as Protests Target the Company’s ICE Surveillance Tools
"Under pressure, a Dem rep said she would refuse AIPAC money. So instead Hakeem Jeffries is secretly funneling AIPAC money into her race through a shadow super PAC"
Democratic Party elites *WANT* war with Iran
"Again, just a perfect example of Blue MAGA team-sport denialism. Feigned ignorance as a political policy. The "average Biden scandal" was funding a genocide he lied about knowing the severity of while his staff actively hid his obvious mental and cognitive decline for two entire years"
Shittiness		The good rich man?				Shittiness
Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves
The culture war is coming for your electricity
Avedon Carol			Preparation for a lynching
"right wing pastors are screaming, crying, throwing up because John Piper posted a Bible verse on the everything app"
Will Your State Bird Disappear?		Crackers banning books		Depraved face of capitalism		AI On The Pentagon’s Precipice
"In the past 24hrs the WaPo has run pieces arguing for (1) expanding NATO (2) regime change in Cuba (3) regime change in Iran (4) opposition to a ban on congressional stock trading (5) cutting “red tape” to expand AI energy capacity (6) getting rid of social security altogether"
Self-portrait with four legs and a dagger
Rest in Peace, Eliane Radigue
Fabio played three sets of Radigue yesterday

HISTOIRE UNIVERSELLE

John Ashbery

As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 AM it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss is being made; it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.

The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.