Of right Of wrong Of up Of down Of who Of how Of when Of one Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of now, or: Born 100 Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him.

He doesn't want compromise,
nor ever to be nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the "oh,
let's hold hands together"
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he'll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.

---

Born 100 years ago today. Wouldn't read like I read if I hadn't read Creeley in my twenties, need to read him more that just once a year, dammit

Creeley interviewed
91 poems here.
Six more poems below the fold:

A Feeling Like Being Choked Enters My Throat

Napoleon, Chirp (o Rosie, who smiles at me when I call Chirp when our eyes meet), house, I choose to enjoy this teffjilt and not griddle grief today

Doesn't rile me up like humans torturing and killing animals for sport but certainly in running for wild card spot in What Tilts Jeff! my country's motherfucking finest metaphor abounding, our colony Israel, how the West was won, how the West Bank and East Bank already are and will be ultimately won jilts Teff every time

Creeley born 95 years ago today

The best Queen song plays in my head insistently these times, it's not only the best Queen song ever it's one of the three best songs by composed by humans for humans and I'm only vouching for this one forever at this minute, have I mentioned this?

THE END

Robert Creeley

When I know what people think of me

I am plunged into my loneliness.  The grey

 

hat bought earlier sickens.

I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.

 

A feeling like being choked

enters my throat.

I Index Myself So That You Can Retrieve & Cut Me from the 1970 Catalogs

Those 48 hours when Fleabus was Anne Carson's head shot on this blog:

• which both gets this post a rare tag and lets me post the poem twice 
• What needs said about the clusterfuck the clusterfuck doesn't say?
• American psychoses: the plague and blaming the victim
• I understand it's a balloon
• it's a balloon to gauge if professional motherfucking Democrats can get away with a vpotus candidate who Fuck Yous both progressives and, more importantly, African-Americans
• Your approval? the balloon not for you
• What kind of country do we want? Posted (a) because some of you like Marilynne Robinson's novels (I don't but understand why some do) and (b) a view from my generation on American the Myth, and (c) I am old 

• and got Doctor Sevrin ears
• American reality
• Yes yesterday Creeley's birthday
• I don't remember reading Creeley since 2019's birthday post
• shit
• I barely remember when that rich guy facilitated child prostitution to famous buddy shitlords and famous buddy shitlords' favorite buddy groupies who was arrested then murdered in prison before he could sing and was subsequently airbrushed out of permitted discourse 
• so I didn't post the Creeley birthday post though I did read and tweet a Creeley poem yesterday, I read that before I decided not to post the Creeley birthday post 
• The blogdays of summer are here
• Know your shitlords, know you're fucked
• Today in American Pig Irony Headlines! 
• The violence of recognition
• West 19:31
• Woke up w Sunn O))) in my head

DIGITAL ARCHIVE 

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me

               from the 1970 catalogs

of infant headshots & paste me beside you?

               This I wanted to know

while the grandfather held up his 1940 photo

               of three men laughing beside a new Buick. He said,

"If you could identify them, then my life would be changed forever."

               If anyone knows the names

for paper as vulnerable as skin, then please tell me

               if I find my birth documents

burned, ripped, or yellowed with information missing,

               or if I don't find them at all? I listened

as the panelists advised the grandfather to search the database,

               my body like too much information

unsorted: all errors, useless without a way to see it

               linked to get somewhere. My arms disappearing

while the grandfather passed his laminated photo around the room.

Of right Of wrong Of up Of down Of who Of how Of when Of one Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of now

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him.

He doesn't want compromise,
nor ever to be nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the "oh,
let's hold hands together"
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he'll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.

---

Born 93 years ago today.
High Egoslavian Holy Day. 
Creeley interviewed.
Selected letters of Creeley.
91 poems here.
Six more poems below the fold:

The Skull That Keeps Its Secrets Saith, or: Born 92 Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

---

High Egoslavian Holy Day, yo. Innermost circle of MSADI5G.
Creeley interviewed.
Selected letters of Creeley.
91 poems here.
Six more poems below the fold:

All That's Left of Coherence, or: Born Ninety-One Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

---

High Egoslavian Holy Day, yo. Innermost circle of MSADI5G.
Creeley interviewed.
Selected letters of Creeley.
91 poems here.
Six more poems below the fold:

The Grey Hat Bought Earlier Sickens

• The deer story that goes w ▲ now below the fold at bottom. I need get it out of my head.
• Flock / Bent Neck.
• Geontological power. Theory of power in 2016. Worth reading just to find out if my lazy-ass started.
• Hoax v Ideology. Comments too, yo.
• Narrative Power, part 2.
• fish thread.
• Purity of Essence.
• Gaddis' JR & predicting Trump.
• Dan's book reviews 2016.
• Ed's sorta book reviews 2016.
• Books Brad blurbed in 2016.
• eternal return.
• The world is a book.
• Mary Ruefle interview: I don’t have any ideas when I write a poem, and the poems don’t really have an intent—should I say such a thing?
• Gnomic Verses.
• Tom Verlaine is 67 today.

THE END

Robert Creeley

When I know what people think of me

I am plunged into my loneliness.  The grey

hat bought earlier sickens.

I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.
    

A feeling like being choked

enters my throat.

Born Ninety Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

---

High Egoslavian Holy Day, yo. Innermost circle of MSADI5G.
Creeley interviewed.
Selected letters of Creeley.
91 poems here.
Six more poems below the fold:

Final in His Brutal, His Total, Rejection of It All

Beloved L, former professor, dear friend, mainstay of the late, desperately missed Thursday Night Pints, one of only two people in my lifetime who tell me they genuinely like what I do in tablets and the only person over the years to encourage me to seek to get it published by a non-vanity press, has through loving emotional blackmail coerced me to submit 25 of these to a press accepting submissions for a 2016 Spring chapbook. I haven't submitted anything for publication since before I met Earthgirl. I have an old small cigar box of rejection notices from the late 70s, early 80s, I'm curious what my reaction will be to the one upcoming. The above and below were two of the 25 submitted. You've seen and forgotten them here.

Serendipitously re: top poem, last night someone tweeted Watching an old movie about a gorilla who was turned into a human lady and she turns back into a gorilla when she gets horny and I replied, I think her brother did the same when he had a crush on 99, quite possibly as obscure a Get Smart allusion as I'm capable. See? SEE? My ambition knows no bounds.

• I'll let you know if I get a form rejection or a personal rejection.
• Alignment - related to this post, of sorts, though more.
• Night visitors.
• All your past lives flashing before your eyes.....
• L also encourages me to write about my poetry here, as in, why, etc, but don't worry - she hasn't yet emotionally blackmailed me into that yet, and I will resist.
• Because while I don't have a system - systems are bullshit, yo - and I don't have theories - theories aren't bullshit but they are biased and unreliable - I do have rules, which I love to worry to the exclusion sometimes of anything else and which change by the minute as I need them too. In my poetry too.
• Into the whirlpool, where matter vanishes.
• 35.
• Thomas Pynchon's ancestor wrote the first book banned and burned in America?
• Bill Knott's rejection slips.
• This an addendum to bullet below - the musician in the below youtube always makes me think of the musician in the youtube below the not-my poem.
• My friend's daughter's new portrait of her father put this song in my head!

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

Of Right Of Wrong Of Up Of Down Of Who Of How Of When Of One Of Then Of If Of In Of Out Of Feel Of Friend Of It Of Now. or: Born Eighty-Nine Years Ago Today

SELF-PORTRAIT

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

Creeley interviewed. Six more poems below the fold

Marks with Acid Fine Edge

When I listen to that at lunch today it will be the eleventh time since Monday. I'm listening to it the tenth time since Monday as I write this post. Demis Roussos recently died. I'd never heard of Demis Roussos, but he was a member of Aphrodite's Child, a band I thought of as a Vangelis vehicle. Various WFMU djs have been playing 666 in remembrance. A brief reiteration of personal history: first and foremost, 666 is my favorite just as the acid is kicking in album of all time. One cannot underestimate the importance of the just as the acid is kicking in album in the overall joy of the trip - this is why I hate The Motherfucking Doors. It is also one of the albums that was required listening on all Major Epods - a group of us (Elric 7 was one, but he won't comment since he no longer reads this blog since I offended him in a retort to something he'd said about Chelsea Manning, and Landru attended some minor Epods but never a Major Epod) split sheets and bought ounces and grams of combustibles and cases of been and fifths of rum and bourbon, got ourselves places safe and unsafe, and brained our trips out. So the past three days have rendered me nostalgic. I'd only heard the album sporadically since - I want my albums back, Blondie, I want my fucking albums back - so I associated my appreciation of 666 with the heightened ears of the blissfully lit. But here's the thing: this is an insanely good album. Thirteenth time since Monday tonight.

Epod: dope spelled backwards. Three more Major Epod songs below.

• Creeley on acid.
• Click the Creeley tag for much more.
• Cat update, and send the coins in your pocket to Arthur, please.
• Is declining violence only a good thing?
• The one way forward.
• The enduring sorrows of the savvy Liberal.
• Szymborska, for those of you who do, for those of you who don't but should.
• Click the Szymborska tag for much more.
• Terry Riley's In C in Mali.
• We Have Heaven is the best Yes song ever.
• Also too: fuck this, inching closer. Fuck this.

HELSINKI WINDOW

Robert Creeley

Go out into brightened   

space out there the fainter   

yellowish place it

makes for eye to enter out   

to greyed penumbra all the   

way to thoughtful searching   

sight of all beyond that

solid red both brick and seeming   

metal roof or higher black   

beyond the genial slope I   

look at daily house top on   

my own way up to heaven.

         *

Same roof, light’s gone   

down back of it, behind   

the crying end of day, “I   

need something to do,” it’s   

been again those other   

things, what’s out there,   

sodden edge of sea’s   

bay, city’s graveyard, park   

deserted, flattened aspect,   

leaves gone colored fall   

to sidewalk, street, the end   

of all these days but   

still this regal light.

         *

Trees stripped, rather shed

of leaves, the black solid trunks up

to fibrous mesh of smaller   

branches, it is weather’s window,   

weather’s particular echo, here   

as if this place had been once,   

now vacant, a door that had had   

hinges swung in air’s peculiar   

emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere,   

asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of   

linearly absolute black metal fence.

         *

Old sky freshened with cloud bulk   

slides over frame of window the   

shadings of softened greys a light   

of air up out of this dense high   

structured enclosure of buildings   

top or pushed up flat of bricked roof   

frame I love I love the safety of   

small world this door frame back   

of me the panes of simple glass yet   

airy up sweep of birch trees sit in   

flat below all designation declaration   

here as clouds move so simply away.

         *

Windows now lit close out the   

upper dark the night’s a face   

three eyes far fainter than   

the day all faced with light   

inside the room makes eye re-

flective see the common world   

as one again no outside coming   

in no more than walls and post-

card pictures place faces across   

that cautious dark the tree no   

longer seen more than black edge   

close branches somehow still between.

         *

He was at the edge of this

reflective echo the words blown   

back in air a bubble of suddenly   

apparent person who walked to

sit down by the familiar brook and   

thought about his fading life

all “fading life” in tremulous airy   

perspect saw it hover in the surface   

of that moving darkness at the edge   

of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth   

his own hands’ knotted surface the   

sounding in himself of some other.

         *

One forty five afternoon red   

car parked left hand side   

of street no distinguishing   

feature still wet day a bicycle   

across the way a green door-

way with arched upper window   

a backyard edge of back wall

to enclosed alley low down small   

windows and two other cars green   

and blue parked too and miles   

and more miles still to go.

         *

This early still sunless morning when a chair’s   

creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still

out the window might be apparent night when the

house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of   

immense empty silence and I feel the children   

still breathing still shifting their dreams an   

enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one   

centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the   

leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen un-

known placed out there in night I can feel all   

about me still sitting in this small spare pool of   

light watching the letters the words try to speak.

         *

Classic emptiness it

sits out there edge of   

hierarchic roof top it

marks with acid fine edge   

of apparent difference it   

is there here here that

sky so up and out and where   

it wants to be no birds no   

other thing can for a   

moment distract it be   

beyond its simple space.

He Tried the Sweet, the Gentle, the "Oh, Let's Hold Hands Together," and It Was Awful, Dull, Brutally Inconsequential

There is a whole new subset of music I'm digging that I am not allowed to listen to when Earthgirl is in the car. Tom yesterday posted Elephant Memories. I still haven't - and won't - read it, though I love Tom's posts (and his poetry). I responded to his email to me (he lets me know when there are new posts) that I was afraid to open the post. I crib from my emails in the chain: I saw a photo year ago, poachers surrounding a fallen-to-his-knees elephant, laughing, about to do the kill shot, it seared me, I see it and will see it every fucking second for the rest of my life, when I saw it the first time I filled with such a desperately impotent fury, it...  when I think about the Dark I feel more often and for longer times during bouts and point to the key that unlocked it, it was that photo. Tom often posts horrible scenes of human-on-human atrocities - he's been especially observant of the recent Gazan pogrom - but human-on-human atrocities don't provoke the same dark impotent fury I've caused myself last night and this morning by not only seeing but looking at that seared image of poachers laughing at a wounded elephant. I wrote: I have a troll that mocks me via email weekly that my "Kind" act in Blegsylvania is self-serving both as protection against ridicule and means for illusions of superiority. Sure. I think it more gratitude for the the opportunity to engage and not be an asshole as well as needed penance for the asshole I know I can be. Is Kindness dissent? I try to be Kind in real life (I am trying to be less catty in comments, though I do treat people as Kind as I am able), Kind, a small tiny moral position at which I fail repeatedly. Tom recommended a passage from a Robert Creeley poem:

I sd to my friend, as
I am always talking, 

a desperately impotent fury, it
surrounds us
and he sd, etc 

Where would we be without the Dark and Fury. 

Well, in a better place, but still. 

I don't think I stole desperately impotent fury from Creeley, but the poem is familiar so I admit the possibility of unconscious plagiarism. I'm still googling it, but can't find it yet. Meanwhile, have some Internal Rot (and others) and the Creeley poem below.

• The Future as Posthuman Game Strategy.
• Motherfucking professional Liberals. Michael Kinsley - if you still wear a Kinsleyian face-mullet, REVOLUTION! free yourself! lose the face-mullet!
• The moral blindness of our leading Liberals.
• Sad and anxious? You might be suffering from.....
• Frances is in Ecuador, invites you to visit!
• No, it's not this blog's most renowned troll, you long-timers who are curious. This one is a relative newcomer to hating me. A blogfriend tells me she delights in trolls, extrapolates readership from the number of trolls she's amassed.
• I no longer hold myself to the Fuck-Me-Jig that I would record and post in front of my new season-ticket holder seat at a new soccer stadium in DC since I am no longer a season-ticket holder for reasons over-yodeled (click on the DCU tag for over-yodeling), but I still maintain there will never be a new soccer stadium in DC. This does not give me pleasure. I don't give a shit anymore when United says Fuck DC and moves, but I know people who do.
• Grouper.

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

Lean on a Chimney to Inhabit the Sky

In the mail yesterday, new Pere Ubu CD. Sweet package, as always. We're Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier and back this weekend, gonna be a lot of Ubu in the car.

• Here, I owe you links (plus this week has been hard dealing with all the Feted Net Ills here at Engorge Tow, especially the Chef King Tumor Dart Agu students, so no monologue beyond above):
• On truth and burning bridges.
• If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail again.
• The Celebrity Left Wars.
• United Kingdammerung.
• Daydreams of power.
• Three days late, New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Food links.
• Robert Creeley, for those of you who do.

ALBUM: A RUNTHRU

Clark Coolidge

I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this,

look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot

on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my

age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground,

shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath

a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my

trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that

curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of

Nightstick. I lie in the wind of the sun and hear

toots and smell aluminium smoke. The tiny oval

of my mother’s youth in back and the rest is dark.

Sundays, the floor was black. At the beach, here

I’m a nest of seaweed, an earlier portrait of

surrealists I saw later, a stem of grey what

rises from my scalp. My hair is peaked in brine.

And this here hat, dark green fedora over same green

corduroy suit for a trip to the nation’s capitol,

how far askance I’ve been since and never another

hat. Cromium rods, the hand in the guide’s pocket

seems far removed. Blurry shoes on sandstone steps,

double and over exposed. Then in this one the SECRET

points to my head, shaved, and emblem, OPEN, striped

in “pirate” T-shirt and HERE IT IS. My elbow bent,

upright this time, behind a pole. I had yet to

enter at this snap the cavern beneath my sneakers.

To the right my soles protrude from beneath a boulder,

for I had trapped my mother and she asked Why.

Taken. Given. Flashlight brighter than my face,

another grotto, where the ball of twine, indirection,

gave out but we never got very far in, Connecticut.

I swim out of another cave in a further frame, cramped

gaze of sunlit days, apparel forgot. Later I reel

in a yell as my cousin takes a bite from my shank

beneath ranchhouse breezy curtains of Marion. On a trudge up

from the gasoline rockpit in the gaze of Judy Lamb,

she carries my pack, my jeans rolled as I step on

a pipe. Estwing in hand and svelte as only youthful can.

Most of those rocks remain and she married a so-so

clarinetist. My greygreen zipper jacket leans against

a concrete teepee, my father looking bullchested stands

before. Perhaps we had just argued. Central Park cement

steps of pigeons, the snow removed. Overexposed

whiteshirt at the drums, stick fingers ride cymbal

at the camera raised, livingroom Brenton with orange

& black “sea” wallpaper and orange&black tubs. I wore

a wristwatch then and never again, drumtime hitching

me past it. I graduate from highschool in white dinner

jacket and diploma and frown, too many hot shadows

back of the garage. Must roll up the bedroll with

skinny arms and lam for the caves. Dave & A. Bell by

the Ford Company Squire first time allowed alone to tool

Bleak grass scapes of Knox farm. Rope down a crack,

mosquitoes and Koolade, sun dapple leaf moss sandwiches, ache.

Then in this group more drums on the roof, the gravel

and the flat, a cover attempt for no album even thought.

I tap and step in the dim known street. Lean on a

chimney to inhabit the sky, deep with drops. Here

I’m pressed on a wall of Tennessee limes, stones-throw

from mouth of the underground we camped in. Too many

thoughts, elide. Then lie on a beach in a doughnut

pattern shirt with a stick, a pipe?, in my mouth as my

cousin grins shiny beyond. Truro, also waiting for the

caves. With the poets then I’m fat and the driveway is

dark, the clapboards all white in a day of all talk.

This then all ends in color, my red bandana and shirt out

on Devil’s Pulpit, open hand addressed to the grey

where Hawthorne and Melville now view of a highschool.

While the water still spills, and the cat squints at leaves

blown, my father wears Brahms, families lean in on one

for a group shot, and the rock remains shattered in a star.

Awful, Dull, Brutally Inconsequential

• NEW PERE UBU! Best opening monologue ever since the last until the next. See previous post for this blog's required Pere Ubu chorus. Yes, the song at the very bottom is certainly one of the five most posted songs on this shitty blog.
  
• Voting is magic! Electoral representation in the post-ideological age has far more in common with apotropy than politics. Very few people vote to choose their leaders; instead they vote to prevent the other guy from winning. The genealogy of voting follows a very different path from that of democracy. In classical Athens, which is to a greater or lesser extent to blame for both practices, governmental positions were usually determined by lots, to counteract the advantages enjoyed by rich citizens and great orators. If, as a fifth-century Athenian citizen, you were actually voting for a politician, chances are you were casting an ostrakon: voting for them to be exiled from the city and its civic life. Voting is an apotropaic act. Little has changed. In this week’s European elections, millions of people will vote for the individuals they want to be torn from their homes and families and sent away to the godforsaken marshy swamplands of Brussels.
• The Dark Flows of Capital: Capital is that lack, it infiltrates the dead body-without-organs, the hollow body like a dark god animating it with illusionary desires, producing that which entices us, allures us toward our enslavement. “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim  to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the productions of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.”
• Catipal.
• Compete to win a free copy of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life! 
• Actually, today's monologue and bleggalgaze in post title.
• Without Compunction: Herein lies the Pun-Off’s ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained, absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel—a low stratum I think of as “[blank]er, I barely know her” territory. People who know me can vouch for the punishment I've inflicted.
• A self-referential reading of self-reference.
• Robert Creeley was born eighty-eight years ago today (lots of Creeley here):

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

As Soon as I Speak, I Speaks

Apparently Major League Soccer's subscription livestream service auto-renews because I was able to watch United lose another game in precisely the manner they've lost countless games since the dumb-luck run to the Eastern Conference final in 2012 without having to submit a credit card number. United losing: True, it's only two games and true, Toronto seems a much improved team, though when I say Toronto went out and signed Jermaine Defoe from the starting line-up of Spurs and Michael Bradley off the bench of Roma and United signed three defenders in wheelchairs cut by their teams and a striker everyone expects to be a major malcontent by July this is not to criticize United's front office and ownership. Or wait, yes it is.

>>Deleted additional bitching about United's front office and ownership<< I'll leave it as this: short-sighted cheap-ass motherfuckers across all levels from product on the field to treatment of season ticket holders. Instead of details have a weekend's worth of links.

• A prediction of intentionally-spawned scandal for Rand Paul.
• New David Harvey: But what is so striking about crises is not so much the wholesale reconfiguration of physical landscapes, but dramatic changes in ways of thought and understanding, of institutions and dominant ideologies, of political allegiances and processes, of political subjectivities, of technologies and organisational forms, of social relations, of the cultural customs and tastes that inform daily life. Crises shake our mental conceptions of the world and of our place in it to the very core. And we, as restless participants and inhabitants of this new emerging world, have to adapt, through coercion of consent, to the new state of things, even as we, by virtue of what we do and how we think and behave, add our two cents’ worth to the messy qualities of this world.
• Some motherfuckers, etc: Now, I do like this - all this death and destruction is your fault because your government, wholly independently of your opinion on the matter, refuses to drop high explosives on Damascus. There's something bracingly bullshitty about entirely accepting that "there is no appetite for putting military pressure on Assad" in the UK or the US, and then laying the blame for this on "kneejerk peaceniks" who have, as has been repeatedly and graphically demonstrated, no influence whatsoever on foreign policy. Whether the Brit stole this from Ghoul Kristol or Ghoul Kristol just gave the American version, who cares.

• Rat's Alley: The "Global War on Terror" may have been semantically erased by the propagandists of the Obama Administration, but on the ground, it is still going on -- and still spawning a multititude of malevolent consequences, as Patrick Cockburn details in a powerful series of articles. Cockburn's look at the historical record doesn't begin with 9/11, of course; the fatal alliance between Washington and the most retrograde and repressive forms of Islam -- which gave rise to the Terror War and its present reality -- go back several decades. [The first three parts of the series are here, here and here.]
• In defense of Fred Phelps.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The Dream's Navel.
• Yes, at least a dozen dozen times.
• My guarantee to you: blog a post named after a Guided by Voices song and post that song and I will link to it.
• The Creeley poem below put this Laurie Anderson song in my head. This is true: I really didn't know she was married to Lou Reed. I confess it still creeps me out.
• Guess what I was listening to last night (after enduring DS9 Season 1, Episode 11, featuring an aged Ferenghi's cackling orgasms - yo, this show sucks; friends keep telling me it's going to get better - Mr Alarum just reminded me that seasons 1 & 2 of Next Gen sucked too - but....).

THE PATTERN

Robert Creeley

As soon as   

I speak, I   

speaks. It

wants to   

be free but   

impassive lies

in the direction   

of its

words. Let

x equal x, x   

also

equals x. I

speak to   

hear myself   

speak? I

had not thought   

that some-

thing had such

undone. It   

was an idea   

of mine.

Be Wet with a Decent Happiness

Thursday Night Pints consisted of neither Thursday night or pints, but in Thursday Afternoon Emails L challenged me to post a particular poem of mine she likes as header last night. It'd been posted before. There is new product, I'm just not posting it. L thinks I should, encourages me to post at the other place, dared me to post the poem I posted last night as header hoping to kick-start something. Do you want me to tell you - this isn't Thursday Night Pints dialogue, I'm talking to you - do you want me to tell you my theories on why I'm not posting new product? No, I didn't think you did. Besides thinking of you, I'm thinking of me: I'd have to post the poems I don't want to post to explain why I don't want to post the poems. I posted a link to a friend's meditation on silence, another friend tweeted about a nice, small, quiet novel. I think of myself as nice, but small and quiet are adjectives that have never been used to describe me by me, by anyone. Sorry, here's a theory: I'm working on smaller and quieter, wildly unsuccessful here in this format, by refusing to post here the work that matters to me most (except when I do).







Today is Britten's centenary. I mentioned it first three weeks ago. I wasn't planning to post a piece a day in countdown to his birthday but I expected to have posted far more than I have. It's not work yet, an oh-fuck yet listening to Britten, but I find myself resisting the music when once it was drop the needle, flow. I picked up the nice, small, quiet novel my friend recommended, from admittedly light skimming it seems a Point A to B plot. I deal with Point A to B plots in real life, many of them more enforced because ridiculously contrived than the ridiculously contrived Point A to B plots in novels I no longer force myself to read. I have no patience for (all novels but especially) novels with Point A to B plots. The two, my new reaction to Britten's music and my now apparently calcified reaction to Point A to B plots in novels, are of course related symptoms. I have a theory, but.






I wrote this paragraph Thursday night. I am seeing Bonnie Prince Billy Friday night with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. I'm going to get up at 7:00 Friday morning (if I'm lucky: I'll be wide awake at 5:30, cats chirping in ears, head-butting my forehead, for breakfast, I might be able to fall back asleep, though doubtful), drink coffee, finish this post, then go to an oral surgeon for the consultation appointment for removing this fucking wisdom tooth which waited 54 years to spurt, after which I will drive to work and find an email box full of fuck. I'll deal with it, I'll deal with this, I'll deal with that. I'll leave work at four and squelch the urge to stop for reward-sushi in Glen Echo and drive home and meet Hamster. If Earthgirl and I feel like quickly picking up we'll let Hamster in the house, most probably we'll meet him on the steps in front of our house, hopefully kept company by Napoleon, MomCat, and Frankie. The three of us will drive to the library - I'll park my car in Lot 9 as always - and meet Mr Alarum and Xtina on the library's loading dock. I will immediately insist that even though we are standing on the loading dock of the building I and Mr Alarum work in and the concert is in a building of my and Mr Alarum's employer WE CAN NOT AND WILL NOT DISCUSS WORK! This won't be a problem. We will walk down Prospect, possibly stopping to eat at a better than decent Thai restaurant, maybe walking down to M until we find a restaurant we all agree upon. Food, beer, wine, laughs. We'll trudge uphill back to Hilltop. We'll see an opening act or not and see Bonnie Prince Billy either solo or with a band, we don't know. It will be marvelous, charming, funny, if past Bonnie Prince Billy shows I've seen are predictors of tomorrow's show. We'll leave the theater, it will be colder than we expect though everyone thinks they're prepared for cold, but. Earthgirl and Hamster and I will say good night to Mr Alarum and Xtina, we'll walk to my car. I'll take Prospect to 35th to M to Canal to Clara Barton Parkway to Glen Echo Parkway to the Beltway to 355 to Beach to home. Napoleon and MomCat and Frankie will hear the sound of my car and see the angles of my headlights as I park the car and run out to greet us. A most enjoyable Point A to Point B plot. I will or won't write about it Saturday morning and post field recordings.







Yes, I've posted the Creeley poem below before, more than once, I love it, titled other posts with the same line I used for this post. I wasn't going to say more about writing (and I wasn't going link-farming today either), but flowerville's most recent post in which he posts a photo of his Decomposition Book prompts me to note that in a startling (for me) development I've stopped, after thirty-five years, maybe temporarily, I'll find out, working in Moleskins, a decision both impromptu and significant, I have theories why,  I'll spare you. I'm now working in:

THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.