sleep at this closed hour many enemies

Serendipity be blessed, one of the five novels I'm currently working on which I need to finish one before buying anything new (in regards to the comments about not buying or reading *Schattenfroh* in the gridofanger below) is a reread of Stanley Elkin's *The Franchiser* (reread seven or eight), just now, Tuesday Sept 9th, like I do every morning, I checked the day's birthdays (one of this shitty blogs oldest shitty gags), Colonel Sanders born 135 years ago today, here, from the famous (among Elkin readers) fake Colonel Sanders scene 

"Ben Flesh," Ben Flesh said, extending his hand.

     "Colonel Sanders," the man said grudgingly.

      Ben pushed his hand out farther. The man took it finally and Flesh grabbed the chicken king's hand in both his own and pulled it towards his face. Before Colonel Sanders knew what was happening Flesh opened his jaws wide as he could and shoved as much of the man's hand inside his mouth as possible. He sucked the startled man's knuckles, ran his tongue along his lifeline, chewed his nails, the heel of his hand, tasted his pinky. The Colonel made a fist and fought for his hand, which Ben still held to his mouth.

      "Lemme be. What's wrong with you?"

     And Ben could not have told him, couldn't have said that he'd pulled his first stunt, an engram of character and aggression. He stood before the Colonel with the man's hand still at his lips. "Finger-lickin' good," Flesh said. "It's true. What they say. About Dixie," he added lamely....

     ...Ben looked at him. The man had removed his glasses. He touched a corner of his mustache like a villain in melodrama and, as they all watched, began to peel it back like a Band-Aid of hair.

     "What?" Ben said. "What's this?"

     "I ain't him. I'm not he. I'm Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I own airport limousine services in three states."

     "You're not the chicken prince?"

     "I'm Roger Foster of Cedar Rapids, Iowa," Roger Foster said.

     "Then what - But why - You look - "

     "Certainly, I look. There's a basic resemblance. I enhance it. I'm a Doppelganger."

     "Does this mean you can't get the franchise, Ben?" Gus-Ira asked.

Been at least a dozen years since I posted that excerpt I'm guessing, I could look but that would be research. I'm 3/4s through a first reread of *Absalom, Absalom,* 1/2 through a first read of *Praiseworthy,* 1/3 through a first read of *Felix Holt,* 1/4 of a fifth reread of *Fathers and Crows,* almost done (but stuck) of a third reread of *Barley Patch.* Part of me thinks it's a victory I now permit myself to pick up and put down and pick up and put down novels, once I had a hard rule that once page one finished I could not read anything else until I finished the novel regardless I enjoyed it or not, part of me concedes it's surrender to my eyes, to my age, to my shitlord reprogrammed and daily scrambled brain under clusterfuck, partly because I finally realized life is too short to read something I don't want to. If I had to be right now I think *Praiseworthy* will be first finished, which means nothing, yesterday I would have bet on *Fathers and Crows* which I deliberately took out of my backpack this morning after reading it for the last week and don't want to touch again for the foreseeable future until I do. Hey, new GBV, my favorite power pop song of theirs in a few years, LOUD! please

You can't teach a professional crackerbarker American history
"This is 100% going to be used to put ICE agents outside polling stations in areas where they want to suppress the vote"
The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide
Trump’s Most Dangerous Executive Order
Thread >	"The administration plans to attack public festivities in Chicago around Mexican Independence Day (which may include this weekend's parade in Pilsen or related activities) because they want to attack folks in settings where people will try to protect and hold onto community members"
How Should We Respond to the MAGA Right's Embrace of the Cult of Cruelty?
US Supreme Court rules immigration agents can now racially profile people
Broadcasters told not to air any booing of Donald Trump at US Open men’s final
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"We may never fully understand why genocidal oligarchs devoted to criminalizing speech would support genocidal oligarchs devoted to criminalizing speech"
AI and the Urgent Need for a Politics of Altruism
Report shows top 400 richest Americans now taxed less than general population
One of the last, best hopes for saving the open web and a free press is dead
U.S. Nonprofit Fundraising to Buy Drones for Israeli Military in Gaza Genocide
"The degree to which Western countries are willing to humiliate their own citizens - and themselves - simply to enable Israel to continue to commit genocide, is beyond belief..."
How much is shoddy, pro-Israel journalism worth? Ask Bari Weiss
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I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats
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I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats
"Too many educated American were demanding far more rights for the common people than the ruling elite were willing to give us. This made the top 0.1% panic. Hiking the rate of tuition and shackling young people with ridiculous amounts of debt is a form of social control"
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats
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Spiritual Bureaucrats			Is ghosting inevitable?
Multiple megalomaniacs					"It should concern everyone that AI is creating a future where all the energy will be used to power robots because there will be no resources left for humanity to survive"
The words we use to talk about nature are disappearing
Maggie		When is food not food?
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{ feuilleton }		POP DETOX (IN WHICH I AM FULL OF MYSELF)
Reading, forgetting			Quaristice		Hey! Ohle! yo
Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?						Fluttering
Built By Language: On Michael Lentz’s “Schattenfroh”
☝	No, I have not bought Schattenfroh when once I would have automatically and immediately attempted a read, I need finish at least one book I already own before I guy another, a rule I've honored for at least three years, it's saved me hundreds of dollars, I'm somewhere between just starting to almost finishing four novels and two books of poetry, I'll either finish something or not						☟
Can One Novel Capture the Expanses of Human Thought?
☝	The most-hyped cinderblock novel since the last most-hyped cinderblock novel, I'm staying out of bookstores though I'd love to just hold it as an object if not read it as a book lauded for its use of the German language in English translation (my issues w translations remain and increase) but I have no desire, not even an inclination to read it, and it occurs to me I did buy one novel before finishing one, Pynchon's new one, which I'll start as soon as it arrives and not by another book until I finish that						☟
Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh portrays a dystopia in which consciousness itself is just another commodity
Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs
A Rare Interview with Tom LeClair

AN UNTITLED DREAM SONG

John Berryman

Whereas the moon, the sun, indifferent,
do less than us dream, whereas the troubled store
is looted and fired,
whereas there is continuous taxes and rent
and friend elected, hell swarms on him or
his, whereas one is tired,

whereas is people so kind he near’ weep
(furtiving a napkin) and suffer jazz;
the jerk.
Whereas he blows white and is lucky to do; sleep
at this closed hour many enemies; whereas
ever he hated work:

could not he be replaced in Paradise,
with the Serpent, here now 35 feet long
which can not sting?
—Well, how we work it out? Don’t. Mr Bones, Ise
prepared to come on heavy and strong
on your side. Only: sing.

Someone Said We Needed a Breezeway to Bark Down Remnants of Super Storm Elias Jugularly

Even writing in tablets feels like pointless work now and gives me no pleasure or clarification or solace, so powerful is the Duh of Our Clusterfuckocene


No one is giving *me* a $600M flying palace and it's my fault Newark Airport is so fucked up, my apologies. If and when my daughter is my age it will be 2058, the Earth will still here, what world will be? Neck Gaiters will be the name of my next band, I am telling you three times our reprogramming is far from complete and ever ongoing: SeatSix, Dr Z, and I disced 27 holes at Seneca past Saturday and 36 holes at Middletown past Sunday and we held zero conversations on our accelerating immiseration and enshittification. Resorting to old and trusted gags a self-indulgent salve, true, and too many WFMU DJs now enjoy their mic-breaks more than playing music and too many now like collaging-in dialogues from movies and television shows, this angers me more happily than contemplating my future refrigerator box home down by Rock Creek where RFK Jr swims. The Blog Days of Summer have started, the AI-bots scrubbing me didn't get the memo. Hey, new Gnod

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Newark’s Mayor Arrested at Protest Outside ICE Detention Center
The Next Phase of Trump’s Retribution
How do people not understand they are *trying* to spark civil unrest and protests so they can declare martial law and go full coup?
The Political Influence of Social Media and the Digital Fragmentation of the West				"There's not a single Democratic Party official, powerbroker, elite, pundit, or politician who has faced any negative political, financial, or social status consequence from their participation in the decisions that resulted in their party losing two elections to Donald Trump"
Weaponization Czar					The suicide of the American Empire
"If the GOP starts imprisoning Democratic politicians, we know what happens next: Those Democrats will issue statements from prison about how they look forward to working with their Republican friends on bipartisan solutions"
Against Bad Arguments for Terrible Things
"Democrats reached a deal on a stablecoin bill that will give them a fake amendment on Trump crypto corruption that is designed to fail, so collaborators can say they did the best they could. "Schumer 101," said one source."
"The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans
"Considering Obama won a supermajority mandate while running on Hope & Change only to lean into the Citibank agenda, pass the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and expand Dubya's wars, is there any other answer?"
Crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protest force a reckoning with inflated definitions of harm and harassment
"It Is Freakish And Insane How Our Society Averts Its Gaze From Gaza"
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Multiple Western Press Outlets Have Suddenly Pivoted Hard Against Israel?
⬆	Resist the calls to look away						⬆
UHC shareholders are suing because after the CEO shooting, the company was “no longer willing” to use “aggressive, anti-consumer tactics” to generate the profits they were promised
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It drives crackerchristers nuts that Jesus was the most woke motherfucker ever, laugh
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Those Who Truly Support Peace
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David Kilgour + Lambchop - Abbey Pub, Chicago, Illinois, March 9, 2002
Stanley Elkin born 95 years ago past Sunday

BREEZEWAY

John Ashbery

Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasn’t my call.
I didn’t have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.
The days go by and I go with them.
A breeze falls from a nearby tower
finds no breezeway, goes away
along a mission to supersize red shutters.

Alas if that were only all.
There’s the children’s belongings to be looked to
if only one can find the direction needed
and stuff like that.
I said we were all homers not homos
but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.
We have to live out our precise experimentation.
Otherwise there’s no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards.

Batman came out and clubbed me.
He never did get along with my view of the universe
except you know existential threads
from the time of the peace beaters and more.
He patted his dog Pastor Fido.
There was still so much to be learned
and even more to be researched.
It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,
anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods
in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.
Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us
and promptly looks away, at a new catalogue, say,
or another racing-car expletive
coming back at Him?

Parabolas of Grace

The traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Elkin birthday post, 2019 edition (now updated by link to another Elkin birthday post, h/t Dan)

Stanley Elkin, born 89 years ago today, one of my Deserted Island Five even though my Deserted Island Five (any island, any time) has dozens and simultaneously none.

(It's twenty-two years since I wrote my Masters thesis on Elkin, two years since I read Dick Gibson Show, I've failed George Mills and Bad Man since, it's me, not Elkin)

Two excerpts I always use for his birthday, read then out loud, please, do it for you. The first captures one of Elkins's major themes, the second is simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking, paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom

How We Misspeak and Mishear

All glory to the Napoleon Emergency Alert System, now deactivated.

I did one loop of the elementary school parking lot before pulling up to the house, he ran to meet us, screaming hello and where the fuck were you. Lifetime cat.

UPDATE 12:45 PM EDT 8/12/18

MomCat is here!

• Someone yesterday, when I was sitting in Portland airport, tweeted the word Gaithersburg, the town I grew up in, regarding its Democratic mayor supporting the current GOP governor vs a relatively progressive (emphasis on relatively) Democratic gubernatorial candidate in November election (I meant to tag the tweet but didn't, I'm not going to try and find it), but an article on Maryland Democrats, relatively progressive vs motherfuckers.
• To be fair, here, from an email from Marc Elrich, Democratic (Ho Chi Minh division) candidate for County Executive of Montgomery County Maryland (hello fellow mocomofos), who is running against eternal moco gadfart Fobin Ricker (GOP candidate) and fucking Flancy Noreen, former Democrat, now developer cowplop: Marc has now been endorsed by Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen; Congressmen Anthony Brown, Jamie Raskin, and John Sarbanes; congressional nominee David Trone; chair of the state Democratic Party Kathleen Matthews; County Executive Ike Leggett; and Democratic nominees for Governor and Lieutenant Governor Ben Jealous and Susan Turnbull. He also has the support of the Women’s Democratic Club; the Association of Black Democrats; the Young Democrats; the Green Democrats and former primary opponents Roger Berliner, David Blair, Bill Frick, and George Leventhal.
• So, credit due, credit given. 
• On the other hand:

• Fuck the senators from Ft Meade/NSA who voted Ft Meade/NSA.
• The irony being no one even knew the University of Maryland had a motherfucking helmetball team.
• The Big Melt.
• A decalogue of American empire building.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The absolutely hug and incredible injustice in the world. 
• Started George Mills, though 
• UPDATE! on Melville's Benito Cereno (and Elkin read his Melville)
• I am back on my Murnane.

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

 

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.
    

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler
    

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what
    

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing
    

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week
    

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost
    

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain
   

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because
    

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and
    

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”
    

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”
    

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did
    

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think
    

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear
    

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,
    

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man
   

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)
    

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether
    

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension
    

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked
    

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,
    

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl
    

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,
    

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving
    

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat
   

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew
    

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,
    

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,
    

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what
    

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance
    

is breathing you in.

Everything There *Is* Is Against You Being Here

The traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Elkin birthday post, 2018 edition.

Stanley Elkin, born 88 years ago today, one of my Deserted Island Five even though my Deserted Island Five (any island, any time) has dozens and simultaneously none.

Two excerpts I always use for his birthday, read then out loud, please, do it for you. The first captures one of Elkins's major themes, the second is simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking, paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom

Am I Connecting the Dots? or: Born Eighty-Seven Years Ago Today

The traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Elkin birthday post, 2017 edition.

Stanley Elkin, one of my Deserted Island Five even though I don't play Deserted Island Five with novelists and poets.* These are the two excerpts I always use for his birthday, the first capturing one of Elkins's great themes, the second simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking, paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom 


Here's an interview from 1976. I reread Dick Gibson Show on vacation last summer. Next up, on vacation this coming summer, I plan to reread Searches and Seizures, the three great novellas, and Magic Kingdom is due, though I don't know I can take that hurt, but maybe also too.

Let me know if I can turn you on, I'll buy you a book.

* I've a story about this, a recent one, which I've debated writing about here, I either will or won't next post and if I don't next post I won't ever.