And the Thing Is, It Stays Still Before Speaking Of

I was sixteen, two months from seventeen, for the Bicentennial. That August, at the Montgomery County Maryland Fair, I bought this Jimmy Carter for President poster

I either lost it or tossed to my great regret now. Republicans viciously called him a communist and but he beat Gerald Ford anyway if only because of Ford's pardon of Nixon, who the face-mullet called Vance the other day said was treated unfairly by un-American Democrats. I don't remember corporate Democrats then professing their undying devotion to full capitalist exploitation like they are now as they accuse Democratic Socialists of being communists far more dangerous to the United States of Assholes' future than their genuinely fascist teammates in the Republican wing of Shitlord Inc headquarters, though they did hate Carter and worked to defeat him which is why I bought the Carter poster (and voted for him once of legal age when Reagan kicked his ass). Sigh, a week ago I was on this Lake Michigan beach at the northern tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, it feels like it was fifty years ago too

I love Swans! I did not hear or see a single thing about the United States of Assholes' 250th birthday celebrations on Leelanau, in Traverse City, on the drive to and from Traverse City from Chelsea, in Chelsea itself and in Ann Arbor the last night in Michigan when we ate at the single best Indian restaurant I know, Shalimar on Main, whereas I remember the 200th, before the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of Citizens United cemented Shitlord rule forever, as loud and buoyant and sparkly and loud and ubiquitous and, get this, relatively civil. To the best of my memory, I don't remember federal agents brazenly and proudly snatching people off the street or Gerald Ford selling his own personal currency, but it was 50 years ago and my memory's edge has dulled a bit. I hadn't read Zinn's *People's History of the United States* (I did when it first came out four years later and sealed my deal) but I already had flipped on this country. Most people then thought I was nuts and wished I'd shut up, many more more people now agree with me and wish I'd shut up. Swans?

The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning
American Necrocracy					Fireworks on Mall likely to cause hazardous air pollution, documents show
250 Years of American State Capitalism
"The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine"
Shitlords are financing the fossil fuel industry’s next growth strategy
"we are one john roberts heart attack away from the complete dissolution of the reconstruction amendments and instantiation of a formalized caste system"
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Professional. Liberals
"It’s simply mind blowing how the only two constants in American politics are everyone hates the leaders of the Democratic Party and no one in the Democratic Party will ever even suggest replacing the leaders of the Democratic Party"
Will socialism kill the Democratic Party?
"If you want to understand why so many young people in the United States think that they live in an effective one-party state, where the labels ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are nothing but marketing ploys to sell the same policies, Hillary Clinton’s recent article in the Financial Times is a useful primer"
Dinosaur Democrats Meet Asteroid					Why It Looks Like Americans Don't Care
I. HATE. MOTHERFUCKING. DEMOCRATS.
Frothers on Parade			Kick them when they're down
What if democratic socialism replaces liberalism as the grammar of American political culture?
Small Is Still Beautiful: The Real Political Realignment
The Middle East, Hormuz and the New Mercantilism
As an expat who abandoned the Catholic Church at thirteen almost 54 years ago I can testify this is gospel truth
From Pews to Pew Pews, Some Churches Are Becoming a Training Ground for War
Heather Cox Richardson, Embubbled Liberal
Virtue Signaling: the First Culture War’s assault on art
We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths
Welcome To Your Midsummer Shuffling Of Deck Chairs In Third Class
County w 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’
"Moneymaking run"				The "real" sin of Sodom
Blood, sweat, tears, urine					{ feuilleton }
A BLOOMSDAY DEFERRED & EXIT MOMENTUM: THE PRODUCT, GRATIS
The below mentions Guston's friendship with Clark Coolidge, hence the Coolidge poem at bottom of post
Philip Guston’s Lines of Poetry
László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails
William T. Vollmann is dying. In his Sacramento studio, he talks America, unfinished work, and the 3,096-page opus he finished just in time
Some Kind of Fun: Hüsker Dü’s Generational Blues

BUT IT SAYS NOTHING

Clark Coolidge

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet

as if to say nothing moves me. Then

there is the chair. And one speaks of

the chair sitting at the table.

Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.

The object is a piece of thing before. One

shifts in a chair and opens the talk.

And the time it says nothing one moves.

The table is too long as the wall. Not

a thing but it stays and one opens

as a mouth will begin. Speaking of

the table, nothing but to avoid that of

the wall. One could return over and over

to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.

Least ways it says nothing. And the

thing is, it stays still before

speaking of. The object of nothing, even

speech.

The Braincase Was Loose and the Rest Saw Pie Melting

Day after tomorrow is another personal holy day and I'd never forgive myself if I remembered and didn't post (and I didn't remember Auden's birthday and wouldn't have posted if I hadn't been reminded, fuck me). The last February 25 post will be the last February 25 this shitty blog is still alive. Here's a hint





Since I plan to leave it up top through the weekend (and may well fail) a grid below before the links go stale, plus this: Pash Katel celebrating in the US gold-winning ice-soccer team's dressing room (on your dime) as the overtime goal-scoring hero cracker-speechifies Stephen Miller's dream psyop hit. Dump is the idiot savant of lucky, though imagine how much fun it'd've been if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated, troops would be crossing the border as I type this. (On ice-soccer: I've been in Michigan motels when a state peewee ice-soccer tournament is a within 50 mile radius of the town, I guarantee you the ice-soccer dads are magafucks to a one, and their eagerly cracker-groomed kids the next generation). Here is my not-a-team's new crest

O, and Dump posted an AI video of *HIM* scoring the overtime goal, imagine how much more dumpmeltdown tomorrow night's SOTU would be if Canada had won, it still feels like a trainwreck a-coming, L wants me to watch it with her, I said yes. Reminder: Dump won with a US victory, he would have won more if if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated (and imagine if it was an African-Canadian who'd cheated America's white-to-a-man (do *not* underestimate how significant that is to too many American white men) ice-soccer team). The American Equation, sponsored by Shitlordco. Also too. There's new Hen Ogledd and it's gorgeous and angry and necessary:

Did you know that there is still genocide and ethnic cleansing continuing in Gaza and the West Bank?
"This same tactic to funnel outrage over intentional, lawless police violence into **more resources for police** was used in response to Bloody Sunday"
Crypto Chokehold			What is academic labor now?
"Every one of these guys is stupid. Every one. We may look back w disdain on the culture of the 50s and 60s but at least those buzzcuts & long skirts got us to the fucking moon"
Trump is destroying a public park so that he can build a luxury golf course for himself					The Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping Spectacle
The Supreme Court and the cordon sanitaire against the left
Some More Efforts, Comrades, If We Would Be Revolutionaries
Today in *I Will Be a Catholic Again Before I'm Ever a Democrat Again*
⮩	and I promise I will never be a Catholic again
Import the War, Export the Border						Maggie
AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains
Knotweed Factor			Hospitality and the Political
The de Sades Among Us					Danger Zone
Bodily Mutilation, and End of the Masculine West
Cult of the Bully				Trump’s FCC Chair Wants Networks to Run Nationalistic Content and Pledge Loyalty for America’s Big Bday
Something weird for the weekend					New Bill Callahan
Hollering From The Bottom Of A Wishing Well
Dumb waiter		Dumb waiter		At the movies w John Ashbery
More mysterious barricades					{ feuilleton }
The ravenous, radiant, Jim Harrison
Hear what happens when explorers of the ethereal collaborate
Forgotten Words: The Raincoats’ Three Lives
Power Pop Retrospectors (1974 – 1984)
Hen Ogledd was Friday's Bandcamp Daily story

A SPOT OF FRAZZLE AND THEN

Clark Coolidge

The braincase was loose and the rest saw pie melting
we'd have to come home to the lineaments of fire
a lot of squatting included with the sleeping
I imagine pennants with the clothing closing in
dimity fudge due to silence in the breccias
partial poinsettias they lived on Olive Street
inclined toward wicked pencils we stayed
us jamokes quite worn through and bundled
to blow things up beyond all proportion
and crow in wacky dingle a portion of cheek
dried in detonator the telemetry theater
now the cheese quarry its more than human wails
present time now added it's long past time
to get the gargoyles to descend a history of pokers
then someone up near the ceiling he turns and
silence in the Vanguard silence to bring things to
then someone blew it or is this the copper time?

one poem that had been over for centuries spelled wrong

Hey! remember when Rob Reiner's son murdered him and Trump sent out a deranged happy tweet celebrating Reiner's death and everybody was WOAH! Trump is such a repugnant turd! and a prominent NYT conservative columnist wrote a scathing anti-Trump screed calling him petty, hollow, and squalid, saying Trump "the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House", which surely had to be shitlord-approved? Decades ago

That's not why the headshot, this is in reaction to bloooooger changing its coding and fucking up the accretive process I use to make these shitty posts: this is the second of this one post (after multiple attempts to fix the now abandoned first). A digibud asked me a week or so ago whether I'd ever consider sabstucking and I answered no, I will never beg for money and regardless whether I have to beg for money to sabstuck or not moving to stacksub would imply a different kind of damn than I own, plus I have bloooooger tuned to work the way I post - adding daily, subtracting daily. Now that bloooooger fucked up the first draft of this post's coding (and future posts' coding), I'm still a hard no to stubsack, but fuck my free blooooooging platform. Being pushed, still won't jump. Fine metaphors abound. HEY! Bill Nelson is 78 years old today

Try to imagine this utterly intolerable, dystopian future
All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing
"It is a strange era to exist in when Candace Owens seems to be making some valid points"
If the Right Wins Absolutely, What Will They Do?
"Ever notice how you don’t hear about the Proud Boys or the Patriot Front or any of those other right wing fascist white supremacist groups anymore? Because all those Nazi fucks work for ICE now. ICE is a government-run terrorist organization"
Speaking of ICE: crackerchristers are weird
"MAGA’s lust for publicity may be its undoing"(?)
Full Court Palentir				ICE sprayed a one-year-old in the face with pepper spray
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance
"Noticing that Democrats are passing “right to die” laws before passing “right to housing” or “right to healthcare” laws"
Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State
"Liberal class politics is when one of the most powerful political players in Washington with an eight figure net worth calls teachers "elites"
AI billionaires' 2026 intimidation campaign is already working
"I think this is useful to read the whole way through to see just how Internet-poisoned right wing billionaires are. This guy is insane"
How Capitalism Replaced America					The FCC Just Admitted It's Not Independent Anymore
"Once in a century political opportunity here, if only there were a party to claim it"
On the coming geopolitics of the compute stack, or Our New Imperial Strategy
"For Schumer Dems, the overnight immiseration of tens of millions of Americans because Obamacare was deliberately structured to keep people on the precipice and at the mercy of GOP savagery, means one thing: a lucrative fundraising opportunity"
On the political economy of the Cloud and AI
Grown to believe that excessive wealth does something to your brain that is analogous to a serious head injury
The politics of affordability are explosive
What will the resistance look like in 2026?
"I don't want to attack people for belatedly doing the right thing, don't want to punish the behavior I want to see, but yeah it does frustrate me that people could accept genocide in Palestine and trans exterminationism but apparently draw the line at being mean to Rob Reiner"
800 Days of Genocide in Gaza
The True Infinite and the Republic of Virtue
Bleggalgaze		No more paperbacks				Maggie
On Thomas Pynchon’s Detective Fictions
{ feuilleton }			Limping into December
From The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer
He's getting weird			Strip tease		Pisstown Chaos

[WHATEVER MAKES IT] Clark Coolidge Whatever makes it up makes up for it as a poem the tunnel Lincoln was afraid to enter etc also please avoid pounding the poem itself there are dense poems and there are light poems lung poems lapse poems and even Webster's poems the tale of the crèche at the bottom of the lake
not a poem but an opening so to be wished
one poem that had been over for centuries
spelled wrong    misspoken    in arrest
nevertheless a poem to be worked in there
a land poem    a strain poem    a trained poem?
we established a relationship    that one and us
the way laid out in sweeping volumes in turn
in exchange    in alarm    in nothing but reverse form

How Many Times Can I Use the Word Poem Without Sinking the Poem?

Saw eyedoc yesterday for every three months appointment, he insists I must have knife surgery this Fall to remove cataracts and cut canals into my eyeballs to relieve the glaucoma pressure, will not give me a needed new RX for glasses since it will be obsolete once surgery done - "You won't need to wear glasses," he uses to tell me eye surgery is a GOOD thing - and he doesn't want me wasting hundreds of dollars on glasses I'll use for but four months, as always I can make a fine fucking metaphor out of anything, I'm no way emotionally prepared for eye surgery. He did prescribe a new eyedrop he said will help temporarily with the glaucoma, I was reminded of the below, from 2018:




You know, if you're gleefully, gloatingly selling stolen land perhaps you shouldn't do it from a house of worship (thereby associating your religion with your thievery) unless your soul (sic) goal is to provoke then attack the people whose land you stole that are protesting you stole their land. Observe the people claiming to represent your values delight in attacking the people whose land was stolen and draw the correct conclusion that no one who seeks power and then claims to represent your values gives a flying fuck about your values beyond reminding you of your duty to vote for the person who doesn't give a flying fuck about your values

Yes, blogger-coding devolving daily into skeevier and skeevier. Yes, I haven't painted in ten days, I will make the two week hiatus I imposed. No, the below is not new, it too is from 2018, yes it reminds me I haven't used watercolor in months and I haven't used my handwriting in years except in tablet. No, I will not watch the debate between the diapered fucks jacked up on stimulants. Yes, my soul-deep loathing of those who claim to represent my values who don't give a flying fuck about my values trumps (sic) my scathing contempt for those who seek power and who claim to represent the values of crackers and christers 

My mother was born ninety years ago today

I fully restocked watercolor blocks, acrylic ink, and clear elmer's glue in days before planned hiatus, in 2018 if I'd told me in 2024 I'd be painting with acrylic ink and clear elmer's glue instead of not only watercolor but only the primary colors I'd have been righteously indignant at the accusation. I can make a fine fucking metaphor out of anything, my unsecret useless superpower. Yes, I will paint again. No, I will not.

Hope Sandoval turned 58 yesterday, I binged, hear:

Our Rulers Are Literally Driving Us Crazy
⬆	Someone for years has been telling you three times we are being reprogrammed						⬆
Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics
"apparently it's antisemitic to say Israel represents all Jews AND antisemitic to say it doesn't"
South Africa’s case against Israel
"Israeli Official Describes Secret Government Bid to Cement Control of West Bank"
The Collapse of Zionism					Long genocide
"After the Red Crescent received permission to go save 6 year old Hind… the IDF drove a tank to the location and shot over 350 bullets into the car… Then when the Red Crescent arrived they shelled the ambulance"
Of Course Israel Makes Jews Less Safe
The U.S. power structure is blindly dedicated to Israel
"Hosting colonial land theft events inside synagogues is a Western imperialist tactic to normalize the white supremacist ideology of Zionism by intertwining it with the religious identity of Judaism and then portraying anyone who protests imperialism as "antisemitic."
When Did Everything Become "Disinformation"?
Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics: Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance
"Dear American trans community: every “if you don’t vote Biden, you don’t care about LGBT people” shitlib is quite literally your enemy, and everything the UK’s Labour Party is doing now is foreshadowing how ready they are to throw you under the bus next"
Marxist interpretation as a vocation
The Crackdown on Campus Protests is Just Beginning
Today in what you already knew: the number two goal of zionists is to create the maximum number of antisemites
What nuclear annihilation could look like
Today in what you already knew: "Israeli documents show expansive government effort to shape US discourse around Gaza war"
Today in what you already knew: Law enforcement is spying on thousands of Americans’ mail
Today in what you already knew: "This man is disturbed, but you need to listen to his rantings and understand that these asinine, racist, violent fantasies are at the beating heart of a political movement that has the support of the country’s wealth class as they seek to dismantle democracy"
Agreeing to our harm				WAR CRIMINALS
Orange cat drinking orange juice, or: what to do with the link on the grid when it's owner deletes it after I've linked the other thirty-nine links and fuck if I'm starting over
The rural western Pennsylvania town my father grew up in was dying when I was a child 60 years ago
Synthetic progressive				Sudan starves
"Do you know anyone who works in the NBA, or any journalists who cover the NBA? You should see if they know about how the owner of the Detroit Pistons makes money from some of the poorest families in the U.S"
'Draft Notice’ from the Shop of Horrors
Students can't get free lunch at school but a helmetball stadium renovation of shitlords? Fuck yeah
Why Are Teachers Funding Billionaires Private Jets?
What is a supermarket					Maggie's
The mysterious tyranny of baby names
{ feuilleton }'s			GNOSEOLOGY/GNOSIOLOGY
Alice Notley: Recent Reviews, Interviews, and New Books
Auden's Elegies of Exile				ships...		43 years ago. I was 21. The fuck am I old
John Barth and the Literature of Rectification
Who isn't going to see Jesus & Mary Chain / Psychedelic Furs with me in DC October 6?
Middle of a Clark Coolidge binge in particular and his collection *Poet* in particular this last month

[HOW MANY TIMES CAN I USE THE WORD]

Clark Coolidge

How many times can I use the word
poem without sinking the poem?
how many variables can coexist?
worry more about the automatic
cancelling device      get on with it!
this is not a skill set