Glintless Monotones of Graveyard Weather

For twenty-four hours this past Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, driving around Pennsylvania Wilds, going out to dinner, breakfast, hanging out and talking with my wife and daughter, hanging out and not needing to talk with my wife and daughter, I wasn't sideways at the world and didn't realize I wasn't sideways at the world until I was sideways at the world again, for twenty-four hours I was



Above done the evening after getting back from Pennsylvania, below done two nights ago, sideways again. I remember my sideways at America's 911 Vengeance Tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as much less visceral than today's sideways, dope that I was then I could curse the Supreme Court for gifting Bush the 2000 election and Bush for the Vengeance Tour, yes I know major Democrats supported but enough major Democrats objected that I could pretend my (then) team not as bloodshitty as Republicans, jesusfuck, what a dope, I should have been as sideways then as now but now's sideways makes then's sideways seem a joy ride

• Friendly colleague, tenured professor (edited and paraphrased for brevity): But Hamas attacked first and Gazans getting just retribution delivered upon them
• Me: Sigh
• FC, TP: I didn't peg you for an antisemite
  
  

I did not remind him that Netanyahu created, funded, and supported Hamas as a bulwark against any two-state solution, that Israelamerica deliberately set policies towards Palestinians guaranteed to provoke armed resistance to occupation, that Israelamerica is DELIGHTED Hamas attacked, that this war as presented for consumption is.....

Sigh. Links today done before this typed, when I scream at this Israelamerican war of choice and its atrocities and its barkers and cheerleaders and bloodshitty backers and especially the shitlords who profit by it (reminder: if this wasn't in shitlords interest - and this war is about MUCH more than Gaza and Israel - it wouldn't be happening on this scale with these goals) I hope it will only be through links and in the grid, I'm done typing about it here and writing about it in journal

The monsters that rule the world have bigger and broader goals in this genocide beyond the extermination of Gazan Palestinians (though they consider that an excellent side benefit)
Reminder: our shitlords are preparing for their war against you
Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech
Apartheid Defense League					This is me
The ten dumbest things we're being asked to believe about Gaza
How (not) to Relativize the Holocaust
"This has nothing to do with Judaism and it's antisemitic for anyone to suggest it does."
Sign the letter protesting Poetry Foundation pulling a review of the poetry of a American Jewish Anti-Zionist
Motherfucking crackerchrister zionists
Motherfucking corporate Democrat zionists
"Tlaib is an embarrassment to other Democrats. She's an embarrassment because she exposes as a sham their claim to defend human rights. She's an embarrassment because she endures so much when they sell out so cheap. She reminds them that their lack of courage is a choice"
EVERY DEMOCRAT NEXT YEAR
Voting will not save you, America
Meanwhile, in black southern towns
Maggie's weekly				EKGMOWECHASHALA
Cats have 300 facial expressions
{ feuilleton }'s				EVERY DAY
Collected Tony Hecht, the best thing that happened to me in my 35 years at Hilltop is meeting and working with Tony Hecht
The new Sloppy Heads album is !!!!!

CURRICULUM VITAE

Anthony Hecht

As though it were reluctant to be day,
         Morning deploys a scale
         Of rarities in gray,
And winter settles down in its chain-mail,

Victorious over legions of gold and red.
         The smokey souls of stones,
         Blunt pencillings of lead,
Pare down the world to glintless monotones

Of graveyard weather, vapors of a fen
         We reckon through our pores.
          Save for the garbage men,
Our children are the first ones out of doors.

Book-bagged and padded out, at mouth and nose
         They manufacture ghosts,
         George Washington's and Poe's,
Banquo's, the Union and Confederate hosts',

And are themselves the ghosts, file cabinet gray,
          Of some departed us,
          Signing our lives away
On ferned and parslied windows of a bus.

The Carrion-Stinking Dog Who Is Calf of Human and Wolf

First news story on DC's news/talk/radio station after turning on car to drive to work this morning news that four thoroughbred horses were tortured and murdered for human entertainment at Churchill Downs in the past week and I'm sideways and daydreaming of shooting people.

I've said this many times: I'm not interested in torture, I'd be quick and merciful, blammo, one bullet, in one ear and out the other. Carrion with my work, sideways. Related, I can't quit yellow and orange and pink. (UPDATE!) Not a balm much less salvation but mwah nonetheless, here's a new PJ Harvey song

MAGIC EIGHT BALL SAYS *NO!*
He will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him
On the University of Crackerstan
The oceans are missing their rivers
SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT POLITICAL CAPITALISM
Shithole country: 10-year-old children found working at McDonald’s until 2 a.m.
Capitalism’s inherent predilection for excess
The fucksters who will steal your pension and 401K retirement savings
Big Ag wants to guarantee the carrion you eat (stop, you ghoul) comes from certified tortured and abused animals
I don't daydream of shooting you in one ear out the other because you buy and eat certified tortured and abused animals but for all that is fucking holy stop buying and eating tortured and abused animals, Beloveds, please
CORRUPTION PLAIN AND SIMPLE
New Jim O'Rourke!			Old PJ Harvey song				⤋

THE COWS ON KILLING DAY

Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,
that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy
of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky
that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

The Artist as a Horseshoe Crab, Frying Pan, w a Crush on You, CWCF

Darkness Starts Inside of Things, Keeps on Going When the Things Are Gone

Every Sunday morning at 9:28 my iPhone texts me data on the past week's screen time, this past Sunday Apple told me my usage last week down 49% from the previous week. It occurs to me as I type this that I haven't checked my stats at this shitty blog or the other shitty blog (where there's no point checking the stats, though that never stopped me before). I think I've tweeted less. I'm not writing, not painting. Not not writing, not not painting, just not writing or painting. Finished reading but not processing McCarthy's *Passenger," will start its coda today or tomorrow, both the best worse book and worse best book I've read since the last. Read Larry Levis' *Elegy,* Levis a poet many of the poets I do read always recommend that I hadn't read, get why they do even if I, entirely predictably, don't ping. Just looked at my digital tablet, no entires in a month, no poetry in analog tablet in a month, nothing in analog tablet but three short entries noting that I'm not writing or painting. Cannot imagine, after reading the McCarthy, restarting the Fosse, I'll take McCarthy's God over Fosse's Jesus one hundred and one times out of a hundred. I apprehend and process my daily reprogamming in square blocks of duh hovering transparently behind my eyes, they turn yellow when I put in my glaucoma drops. Life in the Duhocene. Have I told you three times we are being reprogrammed? I know, I can't imagine reading Vollmann now either. I never would have guessed how anticlimatic and dull and horrifying the deliberate and permanent breaking of kayfabe would be. Zoomed last week with three friends once miles and years away, now galaxies and eons and lifetimes away. I blame me for all of it. Links collected from the last week below before they're stale

Trains, planes, parasitism, and decay
Victimhood and vengeance: on white American christers
Five creepiest moments at the Shitlord Convention
I guarantee peasant-control discussed in closed meetings of the Shitlord Convention
The Business of Strategic Sabotage
Designer economy?				PROPAGANDA!
Is easy money an engine of inequality?
Have you tried being less poor?
Today in rhetorical questions!
All igspays are bastards, every single one
The algorithmic gamblification of work
All igspays are bastards, every single one
Today in rhetorical questions!
DEATH GAP				FRESH HELL
Generous, excellent, and smart review of Goransson's *Summer, * which I vouch for completely
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				Wren on Calvary
Classical music's problem nailed in one sentence
In good news, someone put Delgados in my head

DARKNESS STARTS

Christian Wiman

A shadow in the shape of a house

slides out of a house

and loses its shape on the lawn.

Trees seek each other

as the wind within them dies.

Darkness starts inside of things

but keeps on going when the things are gone.

Barefoot careless in the farthest parts of the yard

children become their cries.

If, When Studying Road Atlases While Taking, as You Call It, Your Morning Dump, You Shout Down to Me Names Like Miami City, Franconia, Cancún, as Places for You to Take Me to from Here, Can I Help It If All I Can Think Is Things Are Stupid?

Bookkeeper quitting. This should give me more joy: Bookkeeper the single worse manager of staff I've ever experienced since working in Arnold's Deli on Redland Road in Derwood in 1975 when I was sixteen. Opinions differ between us whether Bookkeeper more idiot than asshole or asshole than idiot, all agree Bookkeeper's a moron. Opinions differ between us whether Bookkeeper might be a decent human in real life though the majority of us guess Bookkeeper probably the same imperious moron in real life that Bookkeeper is as a boss and all of us convinced Bookkeeper considers herself an exemplary boss and morally superior human.

Bookkeeper's bosses consider Bookkeeper an excellent boss as far as we know, our bosses have never asked us what we think of Bookkeeper, though to be fair our bosses have never asked any non-professional librarian what non-professional librarian thinks about the non-professional librarians' professional librarian boss (or anything else for that matter). Our department gets praised to our boss and our boss' bosses by faculty all the time, faculty tell us, we only hear it from faculty directly, never from our bosses. All twelve bottles of French wine I was gifted by a group of faculty two weeks ago as thanks for services rendered distributed to all my colleagues, as was the email of thanks sent to me, Bookkeeper, and Bookkeeper's bosses (I saw the CCs) all of whom as yet, after two weeks, yet to say anything to me and my colleagues. I did forget to turn on the lights over the reference desk for the first time in four years this past Wednesday and got email from Bookkeeper asking me why I could not perform this simple act of responsibility and do I *want* to be written up for insubordination?

Bookkeeper quitting should give me more joy, and I don't mean to diminish my relief than starting May I need never interact with Bookkeeper again, but no joy at Bookkeeper's departure, the structure and culture of Bookkeeper's bosses remains (think professional Democrats and their West Wing zealot wannabes), and already Bookkeeper's bosses have made interim manager until Bookkeeper's replacement hired (in approx eighteen months, no shit, that's the timetable) precisely the person every single one of my colleagues expressed both revulsion at the prospect of and complete confidence would be named. This, of course, micro-fine metaphors abounding, typed while fully aware few of you get the obscure Kids in the Hall allusion (and without me providing a youtube to the skit), and typed not only while dark and sideways over macro-fine metaphors abounding but angry because it's motherfucking snowing outside and the Catoctin hike Lynn and I had planned today canceled. Along with the twelve bottles of wine I got cakes and pastries from a famous bakery in Arlington, I don't drink wine, I don't like sweets, finally a fine metaphor abounding that makes me laugh happily instead of angry wryly. Angwryly

And joy? Joy is another brilliant new Destroyer song, first listen, smitten.

All posts are live posts and edited until I stop editing but this one more live (or not, I'll see) than most
Every reason to lie about the war
Worthy and unworthy victims
Tweet on Maddow where professional liberal says at least Hitler not Putin, deleted from where I c/ped it, fuck finding it again, American Liberal shits
Thoughts on the above
Killing the planet one coral reef at a time
Unchecked Workplace Dictatorships
Listening to the sounds of extinct birds
Classless tales of class and age
A rant about college textbooks
FRESH HELL			I am both delighted and horrified to discover that at the inevitable news that the National League starting now and forever will use the DH I've no fucks to give
Been bingeing Carl Phillips

DOMESTIC

Carl Phillips

If, when studying road atlases

while taking, as you call it, your   

morning dump, you shout down to   

me names like Miami City, Franconia,   

Cancún, as places for you to take   

me to from here, can I help it if

all I can think is things that are   

stupid, like he loves me he loves me   

not? I don’t think so. No more

than, some mornings, waking to your   

hands around me, and remembering   

these are the fingers, the hands I’ve

over and over given myself to, I can   

stop myself from wondering does that   

mean they’re the same I’ll grow   

old with. Yesterday, in the café I   

keep meaning to show you, I thought   

this is how I’ll die maybe, alone,

somewhere too far away from wherever   

you are then, my heart racing from   

espresso and too many cigarettes,   

my head down on the table’s cool   

marble, and the ceiling fan turning   

slowly above me, like fortune, the

part of fortune that’s half-wished-

for only—it did not seem the worst   

way. I thought this is another of   

those things I’m always forgetting   

to tell you, or don’t choose to   

tell you, or I tell you but only

in the same way, each morning, I

keep myself from saying too loud I

love you until the moment you flush

the toilet, then I say it, when the

rumble of water running down through

the house could mean anything: flood,

your feet descending the stairs any

moment; any moment the whole world,

all I want of the world, coming down.

One Concerned Person Pointed Out That My Whole Economy Was Wrong; Yes, I Said, But I Have Nothing Else to Sell

Beefheart born 81 years ago today
LOTS OF BEEFHEART HERE						Though I can't fix or replace broken links, emmeffing crackers won't let me
Anxiety day dark, I've a sore on gums I daydream it's cancer
tonight the night my life ends on the drive home
I must be asymptomatic, between my job and my wife's one of us has given it to the other or will soon
I've not been botcrawled like I'm being from Frankfurt Germany for the past four days in months, each ping a different IP but all alibaba, Death to the Either/Or allows me to be both proudly vain and vainly weirded
Which means I still look at the shitty blogs stats so fuck me
Did you see how fast Democrats pivoted from blame Trump for plague to blame you for plague, you can google it? a coworker did not find funny today
Books of Jacob, I'm literally halfway as I type this, I don't want to read it every day but am unable to read anything else, I understand the themes if not the allusions and references and that must be what's compelling me but since Death to the Either/Or I must confess I feel compelled to finish because (a) as an object to physically hold and read it's a perfect book and (b) time invested and (c) the promises offered and (b) time invested, which marks the first time since I allowed myself to abandon novels without writing a fucking paragraph about it to feel guilty about quitting a novel, so (d) something gad and something bood is happening even if (e) for long stretches it doesn't feel like it and (f) I (a)(b)(c)(d)(e)(f)ed myself
Shitlords buy whiskey while starving your children
while you watch m**********g helmetball
Turduckens all the way down
How to commit fraud!
Fresh Hell				Blaming victims
Snapshots of the apocalypse
How not to sell out				There's a reason all posts here but two per year tagged My Complicity
Frownland one of this shitty blog's Theme Songs, I don't remember which number and I forget some of the others, and Beefheart a member of the Circle of Rotating Bands/Musicians for the two of five not permanently assigned chairs in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, I couldn't name all the others under threat of cracker authoritarianism, anxiety day dark, fuck me

FOR EMILY WILSON

A.R. Ammons

Such a long time as the wave idling gathers

lofts and presses forward into the curvature

of the height before one realizes that the

tension completes itself with a fall through air,

disorganization the prelude to the meandering

of another gather and hurl, the necessary:

ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment:

you should have seen me the merchant at market

this morning: the people ogled me with severe

goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures

beyond themselves, stared into my goods and

then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant

from day as a carrot from dinner took the

misconnection sagely, a usual patience:

peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs,

I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said:

one concerned person pointed out that my whole

economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have

nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won't

you appreciate the silky beds where seeds

have lain: she had not come to that: and

how about this residence all the grains have

left: won't you buy it and think about it:

not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried,

rinds and peelings: there was some interest

in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing,

finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one

woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you

do with that: but she was off before we fully

met: you should have seen me the merchant at

market this morning: will bankruptcy make a

go of it: will the leavings be left only: the

wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.