Still, My Dice Are Loaded

Shitty teams with old broken fucks deliberately tank for years to build a farm system. The team I follow, the Nationals, didn't tank as obviously as more recent franchises (the Cubs, e.g.), but #1 #1 #1 was Stephen Strasburg and #1 #1 #2 the next year was Bryce Harper. So Democrats, who haven't had a multiple cup winning season since 2008, and to pursue the mixed metaphor, haven't won shit since Obama won his 2012 U.S. Open Cup. There IS no farm system.

• Feature, not bug. Design, actually.
• So yes, more encounters w Hillaryites.
• Prominent Democratic fundraisers realign to push Trump agenda.
• Moderates pivot to Trump.
• The kids are socialist because capitalism is dickslapping the planet.
• Genocidal culture busker haircut #17.
• Life in the Assholocene.
• The Alt-Left: a critical appreciation. Some (mostly UK-based) blogs there to check out, as well as much more. Look.
• Corbyn, the Right, & the problem of reality.
• Environmental Fiction?
• Do you dream in color?
• Do androids dream of electric guitars?
• Below the poem, Terry Riley is 82 today!
• Do you dream in color?

CELEBRATION FOR JUNE 24

Thomas McGrath

Before you, I was living on an island

And all around the seas of that lonely coast

Cast up their imitation jewels, cast

Their fables and enigmas, questioning, sly.

I never solved them, or ever even heard,

Being perfect in innocence: unconscious of self;

Such ignorance of history was all my wealth—

A geographer sleeping in the shadow of virgins.

But though my maps were made of private countries

I was a foreigner in all of them after you had come,

For when you spoke, it was with a human tongue

And never understood by my land-locked gentry.

Then did the sun shake down a million bells

And birds bloom on bough in wildest song!

Phlegmatic hills went shivering with flame;

The chestnut trees were manic at their deepest boles!

It is little strange that nature was riven in her frame

At this second creation, known to every lover—

How we are shaped and shape ourselves in the desires of the other

Within the tolerance of human change.

Out of the spring’s innocence this revolution,

Created on a kiss, announced the second season,

The summer of private history, of growth, through whose sweet sessions

The trees lift toward the sun, each leaf a revelation.

Our bodies, coupled in the moonlight’s album,

Proclaimed our love against the outlaw times

Whose signature was written in the burning towns.

Your face against the night was my medallion.

Your coming forth aroused unlikely trumpets

In the once-tame heart. They heralded your worth

Who are my lodestar, my bright and ultimate North,

Marrying all points of my personal compass.

This is the love that now invents my fear

Which nuzzles me like a puppy each violent day.

It is poor comfort that the mind comes, saying:

What is one slim girl to the peoples’ wars?

Still, my dice are loaded: having had such luck,

Having your love, my life would still be whole

Though I should die tomorrow. I have lived it all.

—And love is never love, that cannot give love up.

The Clouds Were Pretending to Be Clouds When in Fact They Were Overheard Comments Regarding His Recent Behavior

• Bill Nelson is 68 today.
• Amid broken stones.
• Huxley writes to Orwell: Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war—in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
• They have, right now, another you. On you, data, algorithms.
• Earthgirl dug out my CD tower long buried under canvases and crap in her studio, Spinanes, Blake Babies, Mary Timony, Sea & Cake, Son Volt, Ken Stringfellow, Black Box Recorder, lordy.
• Shostakovich, Scriabin, Bruckner, Poulenc, lordy.
• Why won't Democrats call out Trump's lies, Hillaryite Colleague #2 asked me yesterday. Do you really want me to answer that, I said. Fuck you, HC#2 said. 
• Re-up: The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order.

• I posted a link blog yesterday that had the word *illuminati* in the title. I've received 12 comments from 12 different bots inviting me to ask to be invited and judged worthy or not: i want to share my testimony of how i become rich and famous today… i was deeply strangled up by poverty and i had no body to help me, and also i search for help from different corners but to no avail… i see people around me getting rich but to me i was so ashamed of my self so i met a man on my way he was very rich and he was a doctor so he told me something and i think over it though out the day so the next day i looked up and i keep repeating what he said to me. ” if you want to get rich quick and be famous” you need to cross your heart and do what is in your mind so i tried all i could in other for me to do as he said so later on i told my fellow friend about this same thing then my friend was interested in my suggestions so i decided to look in the internet and i found an email address of this great fraternity email: illuminatisociety4good@gmail.com
• Our coups are love taps because our hearts our pure.
• Inu versus Ken: dog in Japanese.
• Daily dose of immortality.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Robert Pollard's site has disappeared.

STAY

Franz Wright

The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled

as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV, chilling

in their calm and unequivocal malevolence.
In the garden the roses were opening,
chanting in unison. My name is Mary and

you really don't want to come near me,
not if I was the last little swastika nympho
on earth, and what was that supposed to mean!

Then there were the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exception of

two friends. He could tell they were friends
by his marked improvement in their mood
when his was at its most truly desolate.

But I Know It's Because I'm the Only One Left Who Hasn't Changed His Number

• Bill Nelson is sixty-six today. I always liked Be Bop Deluxe but I love his solo music more. 
• While the Thanksgiving weekend is the slowest reading four days of the year, at least in my Stringtown Blegsylvania, now through the New Year are the slowest posting days of the year in Stringtown. It's not that I am not fishing for links - a look at the blogrolls show people are busy and not posting per usual. Which is to say, if there are fewer links provided here the next couple of weeks, I'm sorry to say you can't blame that suck on me.
• The End of the Fracking Bubble?
• Police Navidad.
• On Beefheart and Zappa.
• Bolts.
• Tom McCarthy (for those of you who do) on fiction, realism, the real.
• Keeping it real.
• This should neither surprise or anger me but I'm stupid, it angers and surprises me. And pleases me: my final divorce with professional football is on the horizon. Fuck the Premiership.
• So yes, I need mention that DC United's quest for a new stadium has never seemed more obtainable. I gave up my season tickets: there will be no Fuck-Me-Jig, though when shovels break ground - and I've still doubts they will - I will admit I was wrong.
• Between the next two songs, updated bleggalgaze from yesterday. Click, yo.

MY MOTHER SENT ME

Michael Meyerhofer

a text message
from her coffin.
It said, Glad
you're not here.
She's always doing
stuff like that. She says
it's to help me
savor my remaining
days. But I know
it's because I'm
the only one left
who hasn't changed
his number.

The Rails That Take Us to Her Pass Boxcar After Boxcar Like the Successive Selves We Are, or: Sixty-Five Today, Sixty-Three Today

Bill Nelson is sixty-five today. I listen to his solo music often, much more than Be Bop Deluxe, though I spent last night split equally.

Martha Johnson is sixty-three today. I still listen to This Is the Ice Age many times a year, usually once each trip to and from Ohio to see Planet. The night they opened for The Furs at the Ontario Theater on Columbia is one of dozens of the best five nights of my life. We saw Martha and the Muffins the next night at 930, the original on F St, I shared a joint with Martha out on the street, one of dozens of the best five nights of my life.

• Holyfuck, I'm old.
• I heard from three people who told me they would prefer that I either describe what I link to explicitly in the link itself and/or explain what they might find behind a cryptic link title. I make no promises for long-term sustainability, but I'll try since I wouldn't put these here if I didn't want you to go read them.
• We are now a police state.
• A nation of patsies. Kennedy, assassination, 50 years on.
• Anyone reacting with outrage to the Santa is White foodfight, you do know you're being trolled, yes?
• Food links.
• Eddie Johnson deal done. I understand why United made the move, I hope it works, I'm not anti-taunting Baal when I say I don't think it will.
• USMNT has third hardest draw at WC14.
• an old stain deeply set. Poem by Brad.
• My Bonnie Prince Billy concert post from last month translated into Czech. According to my stats, that post has been translated into Romanian, German, Lithuanian, and Armenian, which is all about Bonnie Prince Billy, nothing about me.
• Roaring City. Edwin Denby poem and James Jowers photographs.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Knocking of Nothing. Szybist poem.
• Paper Cuts. Paper's decline before digital and ramifications for poetry.
• Boy about Town. Song you haven't heard since last time you heard it, plus stuff.
• Scale. Song you haven't heard since last time you heard it.
• Black Intention III. Gorgeous piano piece I'd never heard, with scrolling score. Lordy, I love the scrolling scores.

A VISIT

Tom Sleigh

What she is waiting for never arrives

or arrives so slowly she can't see it:

         Like the river

         bluing silver

and wearing minutely deeper into its channel,

the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets

         beneath the whirling fan

         impatient for the train

that rocks us above the water to arrive:

Her sisters and brothers gone, she ventures alone

         through sunlight

         and moonlight

weaving shadowy faces across the peeling walls...

—Speeding toward her, is it you and me she spies

         in the trembling train

         windows while the engine

hauls us down rails that swerve under wheels

rolling through her brain? Faces burn

         through dirty glass,

         smears of lips and eyes

dissolve to spots of darkness swarming between

her eyes so that swaying apartment towers

         crumble as her nostrils

         prickle from the landfill's

ammonia that hangs above the stacked, crushed cars.

The rails that take us to her pass boxcar after boxcar

         like the successive selves we are

         as she dreams us coming closer,

switching track to track: Now the super unbolts

her door as she calls: “Oh is it really you?”

         —the wheel's rolling

         through her head bringing

us face to face with raveled bandages, crutches

leaned in dusty corners, terraced mountains of

         yellowing newspaper.

         Framed above her chair

a picture of a prairie sprawls round a covered wagon

and the horse she rode as a girl, her eyes

         fading points of light...

         Again she calls out

above the train's approaching rumble: “Is it you at last?”

My eyes have got so bad peoples’ faces

         are all blurry...Now

         tell me, is it really you?”

But already the rails are switching, bearing

our waving hands away at the speed of thought

         over the stony waters that

         ceaselessly pour out.



Sixty-Four Today (Plus Giftmas Present from Hamster!)

Holyfuck, thank Baal the ass-end of December is full of Egoslavian Holy Days High, Medium, and Low. Also too, Hamster sent along this Giftmas present: