A Voice Asks: Would You Like a Wooden Gag or a Steel Gag?

• So proud of HRC when yesterday in front of AIPAC she put her arms around a five year old Palestinian girl and told the girl to let Hillary worry about the girls future.
• Apparently Bill jumped the gun with this year's Sista Souljah moment. Was supposed to wait until nomination secured.
• Eff this fraud.
• Israel: the Broken Silence.
• What is our responsibility?
• Cassandra's processional.
• Academic freedom.
• Academic confession.
• To be fair to Major League Soccer, they happily accept washed-up Americans too.
• I do not miss my United tribalism at all.
• The store has never reopened. It's in Comus. The building is still there. For years we'd buy beer here and then go to Sugarloaf. I was in the store three days before this happened.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Lispector, for those of you who do. I am reading one of her short stories a day, something is unlocking the Lispector block in my head.
• SunnO))).

EAT NOTHING

Daniel Borzutsky

It was a tube and clear and plastic and they shoved it into the nose of the stomach or the bowel

Or they place it directly into the skin and there was a bright light overhead

A card read: Pretend he has an eating disorder

Another card read: Pretend she has dementia

I don't like to put things in my mouth when you talk to me this way

But if you insist on shoving things in my nostrils

Then I will have to tell you what it is like in my esophagus

Because my smooth muscles contract, things can slide nicely through my intestines

The device in my body passes through the posterior mediastinum in my thorax and enters my abdomen through a hole in my diaphragm at the level of the tenth thoracic vertabra

A voice says, Would you like a wooden gag or steel gag?

Do you prefer brandy, milk, or cabbage?

I smile because I know how important body language is in front of a TV audience

There are forty-seven women strapped to chairs that recline when a button is pushed

There are fingers in rubber gloves

The squeeze open lips and sing a song about gastric obstructions and psychiatric disorders diagnosed against a lady's consent

When your bowels open, my love, when you think too much about the pharynx: this makes me feel so along

Vomit is one option          starvation is another

My love, says the authoritative body on the screen

I have a compelling interest in the weight of your frame

How many bureaucrats do we need to affirm this?

Look, love, often people don't really know what they want

They can see an end, but it's not the right end

This is a song about what it feels like when you touch me this way

This is a song about a certain type of fiscal strategy

If they say you can stick things in his body that he doesn't want in his body then you must not say we cannot stick things in his body because there are just too many people who love him

My love, says the authoritative body, you must realize that if I slice off your hand in an act of ungovernable aggression it doesn't mean I don't love you

It all depends on what you need me to say

I Can't Help It, Gas Escapes from My Fundament on the Least Pretext, or: Born 70, 92, & 109 Years Ago Today

Lowell George, born 70 years ago today. I was very lucky to see Little Feat nine of ten times before Lowell's death, Little Feat always playing DC. Little Feat is on the iPod, though I don't listen often enough.

This guy born 109 years ago today.

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.

Beckett, Molloy

My avatar's nemesis was born 92 years ago today.

• Quick, friends have new content:
• Mediation: Cat Dancer.
• Celery Accelerates.
• The show can't go on.
• Forty years ago today.
• Riff on the end/beginning of Gravity's Rainbow.
• Goethe bagged & tagged.
• Jack-in-the-Box.
• Making Cockade.
• Carole King's demo of Pleasant Valley Sunday. Lordy, I've loved this song for 48 years.

The Avalanches and Private Tornadoes of Just Being a Gnome

We hiked both Saturday and Sunday. Rigorous, no, but we were in the woods, we got some elevation for our lungs and twelve miles for our legs after two months of fucking winter. Next weekend, some serious elevation so we can judge where we are. We are stupid ambitious this year: we want to go places we can only get to with backpacks and a tent. We are not so stupid as to go in blind, buying equipment, doing it wrong, wasting money, ruining the experience with inexcusable incompetence - it's been 30 years since I backpacked regularly. We've enrolled in a PATC backpacking class, three classes including an overnight in Shenandoah. Expect me to volunteer for one day a month volunteer trail work. Expect me to make this my new devotion, expect me to yodel about my new true love like I've yodeled for all my ex-loves. I am for me, Ulrich of Voll, I give myself to this year's remake/remodel as proof I can still fervently believe in nothing because I always need to believe in something.

The frogs - or are they toads? Thunder, are you still here? might you know what these are? - from yesterday. On the way there was unexpected traffic, I toggled to the local news-radio station for a traffic update, stayed through weather. It was the top of the hour so right after the weather the main announcer came on to tease upcoming stories. And Ted Cruz will announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination tomorrow in Virginia, said the professional voice. Who's Ted Cruz, asked Earthgirl. Some fuck, I said. They're all fucks, Earthgirl said. We hiked for three hours, it never came up again.

We did - Earthgirl can vouch - run into this guy on the trail yesterday:

• Yes, as soon as I saw him I knew today's poem would be the below James Tate.
• Ted Cruz: Triskelions trolling you from the Right.
• Posterity art and the artist in the post-capitalist world.
• On blogging.
• Treyf Pesach.
• Israel: the stark truth.
• Serfdom: you should be so lucky.
• Facing the anthro-obscene.
• Naked in the rain.
• Falling together.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

SHROUD OF THE GNOME

James Tate

And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions

surprise or interest him, even a little. I tell him

it is time he got his booster shots, but then

I realize I have no power over him whatsoever.

He becomes increasingly light-footed until I lose sight

of him downtown between the federal building and

the post office. A registered nurse is taking her

coffee break. I myself needed a break, so I sat down

next to her at the counter. "Don't mind me," I said,

"I'm just a hungry little Gnostic in need of a sandwich."

(This old line of mine had met with great success

on any number of previous occasions.) I thought,

a deaf, dumb, and blind nurse, sounds ideal!

But then I remembered that some of the earliest

Paleolithic office workers also feigned blindness

when approached by nonoffice workers, so I paid my bill

and disappeared down an alley where I composed myself.

Amidst the piles of outcast citizenry and burning barrels

of waste and rot, the plump rats darting freely,

the havoc of blown newspapers, lay the little shroud

of my lost friend: small and gray and threadbare,

windworn by the ages of scurrying hither and thither,

battered by the avalanches and private tornadoes

of just being a gnome, but surely there were good times, too.

And now, rejuvenated by the wind, the shroud moves forward,

hesitates, dances sideways, brushes my foot as if for a kiss,

and flies upward, whistling a little-known ballad

about the pitiful, raw etiquette of the underworld.

There's Always a Punchbowl, Somewhere, in Which Floats a ....

At this point in our relationship you deserve the full frontal. There was one vote for the Death Cat. Nobody else voted. Success! There was one more vote than I anticipated. The person who voted also requested I not totally forego the occasional Aargh Aggregation. I started these last night before hearing today's news of the execution of three Muslims in North Carolina. Four straight days without the dark on my shoulder, hate in my heart, Friday through yesterday. Was sweet. So yes, a pathetic attempt at recapturing the joy of giggling at a stupidass gag by rerunning it again today.

• That's not true - rerunning it today is not meant to recapture the giggle, it's to poison the memory of the joy at giggling.
• Primacy.
• Masters of a parallel universe.
• Good American.
• Three days late: Maggie's weekly links.
• Three days late: { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Three days late: New Inquiry's weekly links.

• Daevid Allen and Gong.
• Canto 22.
• Didactic Elegy.
• No way to slow down.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Frippertronics.
• Science fiction, for those of you who do.
• Some notes of Flee.
• Woke up with this in my head:

ODE TO THE UNBROKEN WORLD

Thomas Lux

It must be coming, mustn’t it? Churches
and saloons are filled with decent humans.
A mother wants to feed her daughter,
fathers to buy their children things that break.
People laugh, all over the world, people laugh.
We were born to laugh, and we know how to be sad;
we dislike injustice and cancer,
and are not unaware of our terrible errors.
A man wants to love his wife.
His wife wants him to carry something.
We’re capable of empathy, and intense moments of joy.
Sure, some of us are venal, but not most.
There’s always a punchbowl, somewhere,
in which floats a…
Life’s a bullet, that fast, and the sweeter for it.
It’s the same everywhere: Slovenia, India,
Pakistan, Suriname—people like to pray,
or they don’t,
or they like to fill a blue plastic pool
in the back yard with a hose
and watch their children splash.
Or sit in cafes, or at table with family.
And if a long train of cattle cars passes
along West Ridge
it’s only the cattle from East Ridge going to the abattoir.
The unbroken world is coming,
(it must be coming!), I heard a choir,
there were clouds, there was dust,
I heard it in the streets, I heard it
announced by loudhailers
mounted on trucks.

You See That Bald Bronco Tearing Tickets at the Carousel?

My friend Zen's post that mentioned merry-go-round in the post's title made me immediately flash to Victoria Williams' song Merry Go Round off Happy Come Home, one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever. Fuck me, it's been at least two years since I thought of Victoria Williams. All I have is cassettes. All I had is cassettes, downloaded Happy Come Home and Loose and Musings of a Creek Dipper last night, spent the night with them, love again, will fill out the discography next paycheck cycle. Holyfuck, brought out of MSADI5G's attic and back into inner circles. And bless Serendipity as always - the day after buying a ticket to see Lambchop in December I remember Victoria Williams' music cause Lambchop wouldn't sound like Lambchop had Victoria Williams not sounded like Victoria Williams first. That's a compliment all around, yo.

I did find a couple of McGarrigle Sisters CDs, so you know what's coming in the coming days.

• Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
• When the sky grew a warlike eye.
• Zizek on disposable life: For Zizek, the issue of ‘disposable lives’ in the contemporary period does not simply relate to some small or invisible minority. According to the new logics of global capitalism, the vast majority of the worlds citizens (including almost entire Nations) are deemed to be worthless and superfluous to its productive needs. Not only does this point to new forms of apartheid as the global cartography for power seeks to police hierarchies of disposability, it further points to a nihilistic future wherein the aspirations of many are already being sacrificed.
• Yes, I've long dropped the long-running greatest academic fraud of his generation gag re: Zizek. Not only has his celebrity and influence waned, it is unfair to all the other great academic frauds of this generation. 
• Everyone is a fraud. I realize I grossly self-exaggerate my fraudulence, but I like to think I'm as good a fraud as any.
• Violence is mine: In a number of contemporary artists whose works deal with the digital — the so-called post-internet artists — a marked, almost frightening feature is their tendency towards violence. The figure, which had been largely absent from contemporary art for the past few decades, has returned, but only to be pulled apart, dissected or made to disappear — not with any visible bloodshed or abjection, but clinically, echoing in style the unreality associated with the digital. This return to the body as a subject of hostility suggests that the proximity on the internet to representations of extreme violence is a kind of imbrication — an unresolved culpability from those watching toward what’s seen.
• Campo dei Fiori.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Reminder: please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber.
• A bleggal birthday with flashback to bleggalgaze.
• Bukowski, for those of you who do.
• Robert Kelly, for those of you who do.
• Already thinking about what to get me for Giftmas?
• Beckett's Embers.
• Carnivorous.

THE RING TOSS LADY BREAKS A FIVE

Mark Kraushaar

It’s all of it rigged, she says,

Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer.

It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda

for the wife except you can’t, or not

without you drop another twenty

and then—what?—then you win

a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb.

She hands me five ones and then stands.

She’s worked the whole of the midway,

she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs.

She’s worked every game

plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster,

Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl

and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do

a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe

the Tea Cup.

There’s a collapsing soft sigh

and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page

and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards,

as if it were her job to intuit the world

and interpret the news,

Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands,

it’s all we can do—it’s not up to you.

You see that bald bronco tearing

tickets at the carousel?

We worked the Bottle-drop

and now he’s mine: he’s no genius

but he loves me and he’s mine.

Things happen, she says, you

can’t take them back.

Sam Thought Glass and Light Signals Might Work

• Earthgirl went to the doctor yesterday who gasped at Earthgirl's leg - which hurts more eight days after the fall than any day since the fall - and demanded Earthgirl see an orthopedic today. Concern has turned to worry.
• UPDATE! It's gonna be black and blue and purple and hurt like a motherfucker for a month or two but Earthgirl's leg will be fine. The relief in her voice is wonderful.
• UPDATE! For content, the general practitioner yesterday talked of (a) blood infection (b) compartmentalized blood pooling (c) hidden broken bones and (d) possible surgery.
• UPDATE! For those of you following Earthgirl's knees, do you realize it's been sixteen years since my clock sputtered? Annual today: I'm "ridiculously healthy", says clockmaker! 
• UPDATE! If I don't hike this coming weekend my head is going to explode.
• Homeless spikes. America 2014.
• There's another new shitstorm (more here) (h/t) in Left Blegsylvania. (I recommend reading the comments at the second De Boer post and at Tarzie's post.) There is always a new shitstorm in Left Blegsylvania. I can't keep up.
• A reminder to please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur.
• Badiou and Beckett, for those of you who one or the other or both.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Damn, I'm 6th again.
• Order out of chaos.
• Cozy Restaurant closes. I hadn't eaten there in decades - since I was a kid, probably - but Cozy was a landmark on 15.
• King Crimson is reforming. Touring. Closest they come to DC is Philly. I'd have had a debate with myself if they had a show nearby, I don't even need talk myself out of driving to Philly.
• You'll see why I couldn't type out today's poem. Click, yo, to enlarge.

LIT

Robert Fitterman

Galaxy of Minds Bent Upon Him

• I've got your fucking sunny day: my timeline (via DC sports, I'm a closet Nats fan, and then there is United, which won it's fourth league game, one more than last season, Saturday) filled last night with the scariest word combination imaginable for my motherfucking eternity: Obinray Ickerfay.
• This is true: I want to believe that Obinray Ickerfay is not only consciously aware he is an ironic-cubed performance artist, I would pretend to believe him if he said he was. But he's not.
• It's a mocomofo thing, the ick called Obinray Ickerfay, though it's a universal thing too, you've had, have, will have a Obinray Ickerfay too. 
• If ever there was a reason to Pig Latin someone's name at this shitty blog, it's Obinray Ickerfay.
• We kill people based on metadata.
• The New York Times, Tim Geithner, and the Three Card Monte Model of Propaganda.
• Piketty is singing to our choir.
• Territorial rights for languages?
• The New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Maggie's weekly links.

• HIKING UPDATE! or Earthgirl and I are getting our fat asses in shape doing what we love to do: Friday after work four mile circuit in Little Bennett, only one small circuit and we would have done it all; Saturday, seven mile circuit, Sugarloaf, Blue to Purple to Blue to Northern Peaks; Sunday, four mile circuit to the above, Blockhouse Train off River Road to the above cliffs above the Potomac, just ten miles from the DC line.
• How to tell a loved one her favorite book sucks.
• Circe and Charlie will get an Elkin novel, I'm ordering today at lunch, get requests in by one today.
• Sergio Chejfec (the anti-Escher?), for those of you who do. I saw his name and thought I should investigate and promptly forgot.
• Hilda Hilst?
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Samuel Delaney, for those of you who do.
• Zombie update (with Sun Kil Moon soundtrack).
• C.A.K.E. Dave's new project.
• It's hard to believe that after all these years Dean Wareham is putting out his first solo album.

FIGURE

Josephine Mills

A poem I keep forgetting to write

Is about the stars,

How I see them in their order

Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,

In their astronomic presence of great space,

And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,

Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.

Having not mathematics, my head

Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments

Of a tortured victim, far from me

In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,

In the oblivion of his headline status

Crumpled and exploding as incomparable

As a star, yet present in its light.

I forget to write.

Gambier to Martinsburg to St Louisville to Newark to Somerset to New Lexington to Corning to Glouster to Chauncey to Athens to Chauncey to Glouster to Ringgold to McConnellsville to Meigs to Chandlersville to Zanesville to Nashville to Fallsburg to Martinsburg to Gambier

Long two, Earthgirl took over a 15K photos. I had to reduce time per photo to a second a shot to get it to two slideshows uploadable by youtube. This is what we do for fun: long long day-long drives. Many of the photos are from The Rim of the World, easily one of the coolest roads I've ever driven, this being the third time. Planet had never seen Ohio University, she was curious, for me, driving 78 over the Rim of the World again from Glouster to 284 east of McConnellsville and then 284 north to Chandlersville - my third time - was the fun.

• Then pizza - SeatSix, we finally tried Donatos, it was very good, good enough to get again - in the room while Planet did homework and Earthgirl painted and I link-fished, it was wonderful. 
• A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF BOB ROSS PAINTINGS!
• David Harvey interview. (I don't think I've posted this one yet, if yes, oh well.)
• Gardening and imperialism.
• Ames v Greenwald et al continued: I’ll start by saying that the fact that Marxists and anarchists now call a billionaire by his first name is reason enough to keep looking at/writing about the social phenomena that brought that about. So getting accused of monomania for doing so is getting very old, especially since people like Henwood are no less obsessed. They’re just obsessed in a different way.  The right way. Accusing people who are making a point of not applauding of obsession is just another way of getting people to shut up — another form of ostracism.
• Naming Bethesda for marketing profits. 
• Sandy Spring. 
• The view out my window at 7:00 this morning in Gambier looks like an Earthgirl painting.

• And very well could be someday. 
• Yes, that's snow.
• Lust for life (not Iggy).
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Tangerine Dream.
• Chris Forsyth.
• For Alvin Lucier.
• Harry Partch.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Planet has told me she wants to be picked up May 14th and 15th. I have a ticket to see Swans at Black Cat on 14th. Planet wins, but damn. Hey! New Swans!

FATHER, IN DRAWER

Lucie Brock-Broido

Mouthful of earth, hair half a century silvering, who buried him.

With what. Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.

                                                             Also directives from our  DNA.

The nature of  his wound was the clock-cicada winding down.

                                                            He wound down.

July, vapid, humid: sails of sailboats swelled, yellow boxes

Of   cigars from Cuba plumped. Ring fingers fattened for a spell.

                                                            Barges of coal bloomed in heat.

It was when the catfish were the only fish left living

                                                            In the Monongahela River.

Though there were (they swore) no angels left, one was stillbound in

The very drawer of salt and ache and rendering, its wings wrapped-in

                                                            By the slink from the strap

Of his second-wife’s pearl-satin slip, shimmering and still

                  As one herring left face-up in its brine and tin.

The nature of  his wound was muscadine and terminal; he was easy

                 To take down as a porgy off the cold Atlantic coast.

                 In the old city of   Brod, most of the few Jews left

Living may have been still at supper while he died.

That same July, his daughters’ scales came off in every brittle

                                                            Tinsel color, washing

To the next slow-yellowed river and the next, toward west,

                                                            Ohio-bound.

                This is the extent of that. I still have plenty heart.

I Had the Happy Idea That the Dog Digging a Hole in the Yard in the Twilight Had His Nose Deep in Mold-Life

• Penderecki turned eighty yesterday.
• Decoding the ideological bullshit of a bourgeois simpleton, part one.
• Optimism of the will has come to represent denial of reality.
• Elizabeth Drew's obamapostasy, of a sort. Going into the mid-terms and POTUS 16 this will be the Democrats rallying cry: Obama: incompetent and puny, not evil.
• Foucault (for those of you who do) on the state.
• On false flags.
• Bleggalstuff: in a preposterous waste of time for reasons you don't want to hear about and signifying more to me than you want to hear about, I'm going to create a cemetery(s) for sites on the blogrolls that haven't posted in more than six months. Alright, I'm going to tell you two of the thirteen reasons I just scribbled down: one, Blegsylvania fascinates me - have I mentioned this before? - and two, when zombies arise I sometimes miss them in the mass of the living. No one is going to be purged and, btw, there are three new places added within the past week, look for them as they float to the top.
• UPDATE! And immediately there are questions. The first blog I click on to get URL to transfer to Moribund has gone private, so while the URL works to a log-in, the site is unavailable to me, and the feed comes in nameless. I've renamed it and added it since it's presumably alive (and as an aside, I think I know why it went private). The third blog I clicked on is dead and gone, as is does not exist anymore. What to do? This may be more interesting (to me and probably me alone) than I thought it would be.
• This is on the radio as I type this sentence:

• Why does Metro suck?
• Kensington's best bartender.
• Food links. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Beckett and Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• The views expressed do not necessarily reflect..... Adding, the GbV comment has been expressed to me by a few over the years too.
• I think Mary Szybist, poem below, is going to be this coming week's obsession.
• I think Dean Roberts is going to be this coming week's obsession:

HAPPY IDEA

Mary Szybist

I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

and watch them pop.

I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other

all evening.

I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

Then to call it natural.

Then to call it supernatural.

I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or

Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.

I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would

know them and feel them,

and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.

I had the happy idea to call myself happy.

I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in

mold-life.

I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do,

and then the happier idea to buckle myself

into two blue velvet shoes.

I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say

hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.

It was my happiest idea.

I Was Fruitily Sentimental, Fluid

Peter Hammill is sixty-five today. When I hear Peter Hammill or Van der Graff Generator I think of  Bavid Dogosian, one of two Davids I was once strong and seemingly life-time friends with but haven't talked to in decades, don't know where either are - last I heard Bavid was in the New York in the Art business, Phavid Dillips raising kelp in the Pacific Northwest. Bavid and I would park my brown AMC Hornet (sold to me by Ruth; Hamster remembers) or more often Bavid's yellow bug in a cornfield off 355 where now the mcmansionist monstrosity called Millstone exists. He would play Van der Graaf Generator and Hammill solo often on his turns, it's been love for me for Hammill's music since. If you see Bavid, tell him give me a call. You'll recognize him: his uncle played Captain Ross on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the facial resemblance is uncanny.







EFFORT AT SPEECH BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE

Muriel Rukeyser

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?

   I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing.

   When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit

   who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    :

   a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle

   burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

:  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open:

   Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,

   like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.

   There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

:  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now?

   When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,

   fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin,

   and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.

   I want now to be close to you.        I would

   link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

:  I am not happy.          I will be open.

   I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.

   There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate

   On what a tragedy his life was, really.

:  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?

   When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

   and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   :

   if the light had not melted coulds and plains to beauty,

   if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

   I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me.

:  I will be open.          I think he never loved me:

   He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam

   that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:

   he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me.

:  What are you now?          If we could touch one another,

   if these our separate entities could come to grips,

   clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday

   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

   Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.

• A thought on the new math of going to college.
• Nothing is more vivid than electronic ghosts.
• What is that brain-looking fruit? Everywhere in Georgetown.
• Trespass and presumption. Howe and Rukeyser.
• Rukeyser's The Speed of Darkness.
• Sympathy for the golem.
• Fifty Incredibly Tough Reads for Extreme Readers contains the usual suspects. What's valuable to me are the ones I haven't read, good thing I have access to a university library's collection and/or consortia's.
• Gombrowicz, who I'm unfamiliar with (and will fix), who has a novel in the 50 above.
• Mr Abonilox, please check your twitter DM for a favor and offer of free beer.
• What is sex in Science Fiction? I have no idea, I can't read Science Fiction.
• Obscure Sound's Best of October w/sound.
• I completely forgot about NaNoWriMo, used to get a lot of bump in Blegsylvania, novelty must have worn off.
• The Cure, live in 1984.
• By request, this Fripp with Hammill on vocals:

POEM

Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

Glimmering Brim Against Light Lifting There

As soon as I remembered Mark Rothko's birthday I knew I'd spend the next two days listening to Morton Feldman. I mentioned in the Shostakovich birthday post that I don't do my Sillyass Deserted Island Five game with non-rock composers but if I did Shostakovich would have one of the permanent spots. So would Morton Feldman.

• A quick FUCK YOU to google on its birthday.
• Oligarchs applaud Snowden.
• Chicken-shit US media.
• This past summer the North Pole melted.
• Playing with icons.
• Batch of links.
• Architectures of pedagogy.
• Contemporary research paradigms.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Investigations into the essence of daily writing.
• Internal Tough-Lock.
• Another review of Pynchon's Bleeding Edge archived here to read after I've finished, which will be this weekend if all goes as planned. Which means if there is content here this weekend, it might be just songs and poems and birthdays (if there are any worth noting). 
• Looking for each of us.
• Click on the Feldman tag below for much more.
• When Feldman met Beckett. Unfortunately, I can't find the whole opera, if anyone can please send me the link(s).

LINE OF DESCENT

Forrest  Gander

Against the backdark, bright

                              riband flickers of heat lightning.    Nearer

                hills begin to show, to come clear

                                                             as a hard, detached

                                                                                            and glimmering brim

                                             against light lifting there.    And here, pitched over

the braided arroyo choked with debris,

                                                             a tent, its wan, cakey,

                                road-rur color.    On the front stake, two

                green dragonflies, riding each other, pause,

                                             Look! cries the boy, running, the father behind him

                                 running too—

                                                               and the canyon opening

                out in front of them its magisterial consequence, cramming

                               vertiginous air down its throat—

                                                                                           to snatch him

                                                                    from the scarp.

Their Bells Call Back to Their Burdened Hearts the Way a Sparrow Taunts an Old Hawk

• More John Cage for his 101 birthday yesterday.
• The next revelation. I am sympathetic to the point of not taking sides that (a) there is something disturbingly gatekeeping and proprietorial (and echoes the behavior of those being exposed) in dripping the leaks and (b) there is value in keeping the story front page as long as possible in an information economy where last week's OH MY FUCKING GODs disappear into the next OH MY FUCKING GOD with daily regularity.
• Encryption: the sky IS falling.
• The most frightening revelation yet?
• UPDATE! I am the other.
• Yes yes yes, of course you and me assumed this was happening. The reyodeling: the value of these revelations isn't in what's revealed, it's in the reaction of the Empire and its keepers to the revelations.
• Five ways to stay safe?
• I bet you pints that the surprise of Obama's War isn't how wussy it is, it's how kiss my motherfucking American ass robust it is.
• I know, I know, metrics. Measure the .06% more shitty, baseline the less shitty, I'm told.
• Propaganda Alert!
• Pastor Sanctimonious, man of Christ, desperately wants to kill Syrians, hearts Obama.
• UPDATE! The United States government, when push comes to shove, wants Assad or someone very much like him to rule over Syria. A distain or contempt for public opinion across the Middle East is the underlying reason why there has long been a bi-partisan consensus in support of military rule in Egypt, in support of the violent repression of the people of Bahrain, in support of the extreme fundamentalists who have long miss-ruled Saudi Arabia, and in support of a policy of relentless hostility directed towards Iran. Worse of all, from the perspective of the Washington establishment, Assad fully understands the situation and the leverage that it inadvertently grants him. This was the reason that Assad demonstrated his contempt for President Obama’s implied threat of a “Red Line” by deploying lethal gas. The Administration is especially angry because in their hearts they already know that they are going to let Assad get away with it.
• Joyce Carol Oates asks the same question I asked yesterday.
• Grayson calls his shot.
• Majority of Americans approve of sending Congress to Syria.

• This week in water.
• Purple Line. While I heartily say Fuck the Columbia Country Club! I am sympathetic to those who'd have trains they never bargained for in their backyard. They needn't worry - it will never be built.
• The three of you I promised copies of Fathers and Crows, my apologies, I set them aside then got busy, mailing them today.
• Crow answered my request that he confirm his existence.
• Dear K, I never said I wouldn't (haven't) write (written) a history of Stringtown, I wrote in an email yesterday as we were postponing last night's Thursday Night Pints to next week, the start of the semester making doing it last night feel more like duty than a pleasure. I've said I'm not going to post it here, or rather, not going to post it here in more detail than I already do.
• Is fucking Helmetball season over yet?
• Quality, schmality
• Pynchonicity.
• Libraries and eBooks.
• Faulkner, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Obscure Sound's Best of August.
• Roxy Music live 1976.

FOUR QUESTIONS REGARDING THE DREAMS OF ANIMALS

Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?

      It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.
      The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.
      The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.
      We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.
      The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.
      The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain.

2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?

      Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.
      Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.
      Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.
      As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.
    Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.
    I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand.

3. Do they dream of this world or of another?

    The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.
    A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.
    There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.
    Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.
    Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.
    Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us.

4. How can we learn more?

    This is all we will ever know.

words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind

   
Yesterday morning on 270 south, on the curve to the left at the split at the spur, the Matrix hit 200K miles. I always liked the car's dashboard looks like a United uniform. The transmission is starting to go, and I'll not sink more than a few hundred dollars into a repair, and the CD player has been busted the last 50K miles and Dvorak's American Suite was what was on WETA at the time, but I gassed it up and Jiffy Lubed it yesterday, it's been an exceptionally reliable car needing just standard maintenance, I feel an obligation to run it into the ground, or at least sensible abandonment.

• More songs for long quiet solo drives over mountains.
• Another person asks, Does Obama think we're stupid?
• Obama on imperial power and total surveillance: If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day,” Obama said, “and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.
• So it's come to this: two links from Politico. Thanks, Obama.
• The surveillance is not about terrorism.
• Police state tango.
• On Lavabit.
• Fine print as capitalism's surrealist masterpiece.
• Privilege and the rhetoric of austerity.
• Maggie's links of the week.

• I walked into the living room yesterday, Planet and Earthgirl are watching some TV show, Captain Janeway is undercover as a old fat Russian inmate in a California prison. No sign of Seven of Nine or Jameway's First Officer Chipotle.
• Potomac drowning machine.
• Watkins Mill interchange!
• { feuilleton }'s links of the week.
• A Language.
• Album - A Runthru.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Celan and Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Malone Dies.
• In the marvelous dimension.
• Seven pieces of HOLYFUCK! 

ARGUMENT OVER, AMOUNTING

Clark Coolidge

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t

the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally

and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan

You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite

your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready

receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat

behind the one you there are

Then the I not part of the you equation, but the

spider trying to build where it is written

vibrates tentative

I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore

crystal region in its light, there are failures and

there are failures

But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the

final catch, trounced morning

this is awful but none other available, words reach

and visually fail to tie audibly retire

the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of

turning aside remind

I am hopefully

this is position

of the world overcome by

and by the wind takes our voice

the collateral one voice