The Dog in Humble Inquiry Along the Ground, the Child Who Credits Dreams and Fears the Dark, Know More and Less Than You

That's new Yo La Tengo, serendipitously discovered yesterday as I planned some cascades by bands and artists in the Inner Most Circle of Bands and Artists That Rotate In and Out of the Two Non-Permanent Spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game now that I'm fixated on My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, what with the recent coup. Here are five of them.

Two unrelated to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game updates for those who follow along despite updates to My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game:

Earthgirl's leg is much improved. It is far less colorful, the bruise around her ankle is gone, and the sensation of a thousand bees stinging is down to a couple of hundred. She wouldn't have been hike-worthy this weekend, but we're booked socially this weekend - Saturday for her family, Sunday for mine.

Napoleon only has three months and twenty-two days in quarantine left! Still no sign of rabies. His hair that was shaved to fix the bite wound has grown back. He complains rarely. He's lovely.

• The debate over the local helmetball team's nickname has exploded in DC over a recent court ruling. Iraq falling apart, Eric Cantor losing his power, the midterm elections and their impact on POTUS 16, the biggest political storm in DC is the helmetball team's nickname. Same game, different topping is all, the hate, people are gleeful. Fine metaphors, as always, abound.
• Something you should know about DC: baseball's Nats, basketball's Bullets Wizards, ice soccer's Caps could all go undefeated through a season and the playoffs and win championships and the local Helmetball team, off a 3-13 season, would still be the only team in DC. This debate, it can't be avoided around here. 
• Let me give you an unassailable truth about the Washington helmetball team's fight to retain the current nickname: no matter whether the name is changed or not, this will never be over, and the team will be referred to as The Redskins forever in and around DC even if the name is changed.
• Me, I'm all about despising Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck. If the nickname debate is causing him grief, then yay. He's Tiny Daimon Snyder, fucking fuck.

• Matters of character.
• Derrida and Zizek, for those of you who do.
• On football and national identity.
• An autopsy for Spain and Tika Taka. It's interesting to me the two biggest bores in international football, Spain (on purpose) and England (because they're England) have both crashed out two games into group.
• Been a bad couple of months for Stevie England, yes?
• The terrible embarrassment of the goalie on the Crown Prince's birthday.
• Rockville weighs in on NoBeSoRo.
• David Markson, for those of you who do.
• Beckett (Molloy in particular), for those of you who do.
• Rothko and Taggert, for those of you who do.
• Not today, but yes, the word Rothko sets off a Morton Feldman cascade in my head, soon here.
• Tuxedomoon, for those of you who do.

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

I Guess Entering a Sex Cinema Dressed in a Black Shirt, Jeans with the Crotch Removed, and a Machine Gun Slung Over Her Shoulder Is Not in the Cards Now

Fell asleep listening to, woke up with Durutti Column in my head. Be in yours.

Saw The Grand Budapest Hotel last night with Earthgirl and Planet. I liked it, with quibbles, but I am not qualified to judge movies. Or rather, I don't feel qualified to judge movies like I feel qualified to judge music or novels or poetry. Whether I am qualified to judge music or novels or poetry is up to you. I think I am, though your opinion may differ. I just rarely watch movies. This is not a moral decision - I like watching movies, I don't think it wrong to watch movies - it is a decision based on recognition of my personal finite time and my tendencies towards obsession. Long ago, forty years ago, I made the conscious choice to obsess over music and novels and poetry at the expense of drama and cinema. I do not regret the choice - I love music, novels, poetry. It was the right choice for me. I'd make it again. Of course I have seen movies in those forty years, but whenever I have felt the urge to learn more about cinema - and I do not have even the most rudimentary knowledge of basic cinematography nor the history of movies (for instance, when I mentioned to friends I was offered tickets to The Grand Budapest Hotel they said, oh, I love Wes Anderson (not Carpenter, as I wrote at first, to Richard's amusement), and I said who? and they looked at me and said, you know, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom, and I said, what?) - I deliberately chose to squelch that urge. I have only so much time to feed the obsessions I already have. It occurs to me this morning that I unconsciously picked Durutti Column last night to appease my music obsessions for having betrayed them for spending two hours watching a movie, choosing a sound I hold holy.

(What I was reminded of most last night as I sat in the next to back row of a Bethesda Row Landmark Theater is how much I hate going to movie theaters, the buttered popcorn smell, the cavernous sterility that produces acute anxiety in me, the sitting in the dark with strangers. I like to think I chose music and novels and poetry forty years ago at the expense of cinema and drama because I genuinely prefer them - and I believe that to be true - but I hated to go to theaters then when DVDs and streaming movies in solitude, in light, in my own space, was unimaginable, and I'm certain that hate was a contributing factor in my choice of obsessions.)

Reading is harder, physically harder, these days. My eyes strain easier now I'm older. I can't read in bed, I fall asleep, fall into those daytime naps that leave me unpleasantly buzzed and yellow when I wake up. I don't try anymore. Now, my mind tells me, now is the time to turn to cinema for those reasons alone. That doesn't seem honorable, turning to a new obsession because my eyes are getting too old and strained for old obsessions. Silly, but there it is, I feel morally compelled to maintain loyalty to obsessions even if the time given to those obsessions is spent on bad sleep and dull headaches caused by eye strain.

I'll see. Perhaps someday I'll solicit advice and syllabi from you for a Freshman class in what movies I should have in my mental cultural database. It's improbable though no longer impossible that I'd ask.








ESSAY

Stephanie Young

after Bernadette Mayer

I guess it's too late to live on the farm

I guess it's too late to enter the darkened room in which a single light

illuminated the artist stripped from the waist down, smeared with

blood, stretched and bound to the table

I guess it's too late to inhabit a glass-fronted, white, box-like room,

dressed in white, against which the menstrual blood was visible

I guess it's too late to start farming

I guess it's too late to start struggling to remain standing in a

transparent plastic cubicle filled with wet clay, repeatedly slipping and

falling

I guess it's too late to buy 60,000 acres in Marfa

I guess it's too late to begin appearing on the subway in stinking

clothes during rush hour with balloons attached to her ears, nose, hair

and teeth

I guess we'll never have an orgiastic Happening

I guess we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public

spaces, during public hours

I guess we couldn't afford to simulate masturbation while President

Josip Broz Tito's motorcade drove by below

I guess we're not suited to "I am awake in the place where women die"

I guess we'll never have a self-inflicted wound in front of an audience now

I guess entering a sex cinema dressed in a black shirt, jeans with the

crotch removed, and a machine gun slung over her shoulder is not in

the cards now

I guess Clive wouldn't make a good photographic montage in which

their male and female faces became almost indistinguishable

I guess I can't expect we'll ever have a selection of photographs derived

from images produced by the beauty industry now

I guess I'll have to give up all my dreams of being seen, clothed and

unclothed, being systematically measured by two male 'researchers'

who record her measurements on a chart and compare them with a set

of 'normal' measurements

I guess I'll never be waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly

We couldn't get tied together by our hair anyways though Allen

Ginsberg got one late in life

Maybe someday I'll have the foreshortened barrel of a gun pointing

toward the viewer

I guess joining our hands around the base's perimeter fence into which

they weave strands of wool is really out

Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops

I guess examining women's working conditions is just too difficult

We'll never have a, never-really-a-collective, a group of women who

came together to work on a public mural

Too much work and still to be poets

Who are the simultaneously-the-beneficiary-of-our-cultural-heritage-

and-a-victim-of-it-poets

Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient loss of certainty

Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks

And Wendell Berry has raised large-scale spirals of rusted industrial

materials in incongruous natural and commercial spaces

Faulkner may have spent three days in a gallery with a coyote, a little

And Robert Frost asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22

caliber rifle

And someone told me Samuel Beckett lay hidden under a gallery-wide

ramp, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies

about the visitors walking above him

Very few poets are really going to the library carrying a concealed tape

recording of loud belches

If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,

If Yves Klein could be an artist, and Jackson Pollock too,

Why not a poet who was also dying of lymphoma and making a series of

life size photographs, self-portrait watercolors, medical object-sculptures

and collages made with the hair she lost during chemotherapy

Of course there was Brook Farm

And Virgil raised bees

Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of the meticulous

chronicle of the feeding and

                    excretory cycles of her son during the first six months of his life

I guess poets tend to live more momentarily

Than life in her body as the object of her own sculpting activity would allow

You could never leave the structures made of wood, rope and concrete

blocks assembled to form

                    stocks and racks, to give a reading

Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord

I don't want to be continuously scrubbing the flesh off of cow bones

with a cleaning brush but

                    my mother was right

I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat

Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve

That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes

Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing

Or on as little as one needs to survive

Steadfast as any person's glottis, photographed with a laryngoscope,

speaking the following

                    words: "The power of language continues to show its trace for

a long time after silence"

                    and fixed as the stars

Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

Pull My Chin, Stroke My Hair, Scratch My Nose, Hug My Knees, Try Drink, Food, Cigarette, Tension Will Not Ease, I Tap My Fingers, Fold My Arms, Breathe in Deep, Cross My Legs, Shrug My Shoulders, Stretch My Back - but Nothing Seems to Please

• Those of you who had 24 hours - like me - for as long as I could go without posting would have lost but all of us who bet I couldn't go the weekend win. Song above explains.
• Uncle Bill was Bajoran?
• Towards global authoritarianism.
• For example.
• davidly gets screwed trying to buy Kate Bush tickets, reacts with letter, great Kate Bush song.
• As much as I like much of the New York Review of Books I sometimes forget a certain hawkishness - here's someone calling Obama a pussy towards Putin - in foreign policy articles. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Bryce played three hours of Robert Ashley this past Friday.
• I've been re-watching - it feels more like watching for the first time - Deep Space Nine on the recommendation of friends. Watching on Netflix allows me not only to miss commercials but to skip the interminable opening. Last light I saw the episode with Uncle Bill. Jody, Buffy, and Cissy were mutes, their tongues cut out by Cardassians. There was no sign of Mr French. I got to wondering who is the actress who plays Major Kira Nerys, which allows me, to my giggling delight, to play an Ashley piece and use this gag:

• Yes, post today because I need contact, but mostly because I can't sit on that gag for another 24 hours.
• Another Moby Dick book acquired.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Tom introduces me, via her poem, to Nin Andrews. In comments it turns out she lives in the traffic jam called Nova.
• Long playlist from Prunella.
• My favorite road in MOCO. Fuck the Pattons, you bought there knowing, assholes.
• A contemplation on Ashbery's poetics: I sort of seized upon this quote with a ridiculous kind of “yes!” because I felt like it was describing in a wonderful prescient and powerful way the poetics of Ashbery.  In Ashbery’s poems, the page is a kind of experimental and experiential laboratory, in and through which new meanings, new metaphors, are attempted.  Through this process, the “meaning of the present” is amplified, and we are taken so far out of (and so near towards?) our customary thinking that we are then able to think more clearly about our present values, preoccupations, habits, beliefs, etc.  It is in this sense that we can think of Ashbery’s work as an exploration of what a moral imagination means, which is another of saying that Ashbery attempts to give us the most robust, diverse, and rich possible answer to this question.  His poetry is therefore an unprecedentedly moving and powerful example of the moral imagination at work, while at the same time it teaches us the importance and relevance of the imagination as the primary means by which we actually think and live.
• Below Durutti Column, without doubt the most-posted poem here ever.

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

I'd Be a Rich Man Had I Yielded on a Few Points of Principle

• Durutti Column! Oh man, I know what my next few days is going to sound like.
• A press as deadly as the state: One of the key pillars supporting the pretense of a "responsive democracy" is the belief in a "free," "adversarial" press. But as described above -- and there is much, much more that could be said on the subject -- it is difficult to imagine how the NSA/surveillance story could redound more fully to the benefit of the States involved while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of "adversarial" journalism. It is a propaganda coup for the State of notable proportions.
• Germane nooze.
• Literature and bureaucracy.
• The Pervert's Guide to Ideology: Those lies and a way to get at the truths they conceal, the very fragile nature of the truth, are the subject of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology by Sophie Fiennes, sister of Ralph and poor Joe (how many moons ago was Shakespeare in Love?), about the psychoanalytic film criticism of the Slovenian philosopher and critic and celebrity Slavoj Žižek. Released theatrically at the beginning of the month, it is a follow up to her 2006 film A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. The newer film follows a very similar formal strategy as the earlier one, intercutting between clips of classic films from Hollywood to Scandinavia to Soviet Russia, while Žižek appears intermittently on sets and in costumes drawn from the very movies he claims to mine hidden and often unintentional meanings from using his patented mix of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. 
• Oh, and in a photo, Žižek appears as Blofeld circa Diamonds Are Forver.
• Diamonds Are Forever, of course, has the famous scene of Dema Kovalenko being castrated by his own bomb as he's thrown off the side of a luxury cruise ship. Regulars here can play it in their head without my needing to post the youtube for the zillionth time.

• Anyway, there was a zebra.
• Ruefle's Observations on the Ground: Besides burying the dead in the ground, we bury our garbage, also called trash. Man-made mountains of garbage are pushed together using heavy equipment and then pushed down into the ground. The site of this burial is called a landfill. The site of the dead buried in boxes is called a cemetery. In both cases the ground is being filled. A dead body in a box can be lowered into the ground using heavy equipment, but we do not consider it trash. When the dead are not in boxes and there is a man-made mountain of them we use heavy equipment to bury them together, like trash. It is estimated that everywhere we walk we are walking on a piece of trash and the hard, insoluble remains of the dead. Whatever the case, the dead and the garbage are together in the ground where we cannot see them, for we do not relish the sight or smell of them. If we did not go about our burying, we would be in danger of being overcome.
• All that was signal dissolves into noise.
• Hey! It's Zappadan!
• Bleggalgazing.
• Food links.
• Fuck the Washington Racial Slurs.
• Fucking Ohio. Maryland too!
• Growing a bear.
• Area under surveillance.

HIS CARPETS FLOWERED

Lorine Niedecker

I

—how we’re carpet-making

by the river

a long dream to unroll

and somehow time to pole

a boat

I designed a carpet today—

dogtooth violets

and spoke to a full hall

now that the gall

of our society’s

corruption stains throughout

Dear Janey I am tossed

by many things

If the change would bring

better art

but if it would not?

O to be home to sail the flood

I’m possessed

and do possess

Employer

of labor, true—

to get done

the work of the hand…

I’d be a rich man

had I yielded

on a few points of principle

Item sabots

blouse—

I work in the dye-house

myself

Good sport dyeing

tapestry wool

I like the indigo vats

I’m drawing patterns so fast

Last night

in sleep I drew a sausage—

somehow I had to eat it first

Colorful shores—mouse ear...

horse-mint... The Strawberry Thief

our new chintz
  

II

Yeats saw the betterment of the workers

by religion—slow in any case

as the drying of the moon

He was not understood—

I rang the bell

for him to sit down

Yeats left the lecture circuit

yet he could say: no one

so well loved

as Morris
  

III

Entered new waters

Studied Icelandic

At home last minute signs

to post:

Vetch

grows here—Please do not mow

We saw it—Iceland—the end

of the world rising out of the sea—

cliffs, caves like 13th century

illuminations

of hell-mouths

Rain squalls through moonlight

Cold wet

is so damned wet

Iceland’s

black sand

Stone buntings’

fly-up-dispersion

Sea-pink and campion a Persian

carpet