What Is Behind It? - Space, Plenty of Empty Space. And Who Is Talking Now? - A Man Asleep Under His Hat.

That's the photo I wanted to post the other day but pulled down because I fucked up the coding and photos displayed differently than before. It's looking east from Grove Church Road, Martinsburg Ohio, between Sycamore and Deal Rds, at 7:45 Sunday morning September 15, 2013 just after we'd abandoned our daughter at college. As I've written dozens of times, for over two years now I've been unable to change anything at this blog that requires the use of the Apply to Template button: I can't change colors, fonts, font sizes, layout, column widths, etc. Until I accidentally deleted a <div> code in a post earlier this week and ignored Blogger's warning and pushed publish anyway, when I posted photos wider than the center column the photos bled over the right blogroll, but since I fucked up the blogroll now lays over the photos. Laid. Fuck that, fuck it, fuck this. Right blogroll has been moved to left blogroll. The cemetery and soccer blogrolls have been killed. The number of blogs displaying in each individual blogroll has been reduced to the ten most recently updated. Since fewer and fewer people are updating their blogs you may not even notice even if you are one of the few who link out from the page, and if you are you can always click the Show All button at the bottom of each blogroll. My apologies for the inconvenience, but I was choking here between the two columns. Also, it's been five days since we've seen him, I usually wait a week, but Earthgirl has asked me to activate the Napoleon Alert System.

• Another reason for the change, an unimpeded signal.
• Multiplying in a column M by F.
• And youtubes will be bigger too.
• Neoliberalism depends upon and rewards one form of neurosis. 
• Grand Theft Auto and the extinction of being.
• All linkedin and nowhere to go.
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready. Last time. Call me when Krugman writes a column asking why Democrats/Obama peg their shittiness to GOP shittiness. He knows why.
• Obama's "I am not a crook," moment.
• On the Ayn Rand apostle who called Lloyd Blankenfeld holier than Mother Teresa.
• I'm 80 pages into Bleeding Edge and more than meh, but not by much. I haven't read that review yet, btw, or any review (I want to read the book first) though I did read Kakutani's, I knew she'd hate it, knew she'd misread it.
• Psalm to be read with closed eyes.
• Breakfast with Thom Gunn.
• Bright day.
• Elliot Carter's Changes.
• Was going to post two more fever songs - I'm fine, this turned out to be, so far, fingers crossed, an intense but only 48 hour drive-by cold - this first song, serendipitously, posted here hours before SeatSix sent me a playlist in the middle of the night for Johnette Napolitano for her birthday tomorrow, he being a HUGE Concrete Blonde fan. I like, not love, but do love this song, especially with a 103 degree fever. Longtimers, hearing the below Concrete Blonde song, can probably guess what song's below the poem.

TAPESTRY

Charles Simic

It hangs from heaven to earth.

There are trees in it, cities, rivers,   

small pigs and moons. In one corner

the snow falling over a charging cavalry,   

in another women are planting rice.

You can also see:

a chicken carried off by a fox,

a naked couple on their wedding night,

a column of smoke,

an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.

What is behind it?

—Space, plenty of empty space.

And who is talking now?

—A man asleep under his hat.

What happens when he wakes up?

—He’ll go into a barbershop.

They’ll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair,   

To make him look like everyone else.

I Am in Elaboration of Knowledge Impatient of Even the Patientest Immobility

Zen (see above) and Zombie and Bastard and Skippy remind me that yesterday was Blogroll Amnesty Day. Please note in the right column the NEW HERE blogroll. Please note that I limit the floating blogrolls to only the 25 most recently updated sites (for lamely aesthetic reasons) so please use the Show All option to see more if you haven't stopped by for a few days. As always, if there is someone you think I should be reading, for pleasure and/or insight, please let me know. As always, thanks for reading. As always, thanks for all the Kind, linkages and blogrolling. >>Deleted bleggalgazing<< As always, apologies or you're welcome (or both if you're not one or the other but both) for the >>Deleted bleggalgazing<< As always, if you are doing me a Kind and I am not reciprocating please let me know.




   
The Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet's Landfall: Scenes from My New Novel last night was wonderful, a special evening, made better by the discovery of a great Indian restaurant in Hillandale. No sound I can play here of the piece yet exists, so here's Kronos' version of Feldman's Piano and String Quartet - I know, I post this all the time, shoot me, I love it. Here's part two, three, four, five and six are below this block and below the poem respectively. President Douche. Oh, Wilbur. The Burger King Capital Beltway. This reminds me that on our trip to visit Planet last weekend, she asked me to loan her my copy of Infinite Jest. Oh dear, look who rich GOP donors fear. Poetry slam. Avedon's linkages. New blogs. Too little too late. Badiou, for those of you who do. Beckett, for those of you who do. Anthony's Links of the Week. The future of terror. Gerald Stern. A Chinese Finnegan's Wake. A Blissblog playlist. Matribute. It's nineteen-something-other-or-two.




KIND

Josephine Miles

When I think of my kindness which is tentative and quiet

And of yours which is intense and free,

I am in elaboration of knowledge impatient

Of even the patientest immobility.

I think of my kind, which is the human fortune

To live in the world and make war among its friends,

And of my version, which is to be moderately peaceful,

And of your version; and must make amends

By my slow word to your wish which is mobile,

Active and moving in its generous sphere.

This is the natural and the supernatural

Of humankind of which I grow aware.

       

It Was Sad, Exciting, and Horrible. It was Exciting, Horrible, and Sad. It Was Horrible, Sad, and Exciting. It Was Inviting, Mad, and Deplorable. It Was Adorable, Glad, and Enticing

I'm leaving Momcat topside in daylight for today, headers usually posted between 1930 and 730 give or take. Writing about the ferals is even less popular than bleggalgazing (though this is of course bleggalgazing) or writing about Ishiguro or United. I subscribe to my neighborhood's listserv (or one of many, I'd guess), a recent thread is the vermin feral cats represent. RABIES! Feral cats ripped my flesh, rzzzz, Zappadan and all. Disappearances of goldfinches, did you know Parkwood once was world famous for its goldfinch population, flashes yellow and black summer long, people traveled near and far for Parkwood's famous goldfinches? Join your neighborhood's listservs, find out how glorious your neighborhood once never was in old farts' memories. Someone said the martins disappeared, there's not a house(martin) in Parkwood with more than a quarter-acre lot, all of it wooded, I love martins, there aren't and weren't martins in Parkwood. But I have seen Frankie with a bluejay in his mouth (Earthgirl gasped, Frankie opened his mouth, the jay flew away), seen Frankie with a mockingbird that escaped when I clapped, Momcat with a nuthatch, no playing, just dinner, Napoleon with no birds, asleep on the sofa after all he could eat dinners. I do understand the anger towards ferals of the person whose yard is full of bird feeders, who stands at his window all day with binoculars and camera even as sets them down to type an email to a neighborhood listserv demanding the ferals be trapped and killed like plague-bearing rats. We probably nod and smile and make small talk when we come upon the other on neighborhood walks. As always, fine metaphors abound.

• Which is to say, thank you, fellow J, for the reminder, it is time to reengage the happy fuckit.
• Good cop, bad cop.
• It's wrong to pre-judge, but on the other hand....
• Bad faith: It's not that I think liberals support torture. No, I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. What liberals want is ultimately to do what conservative hawks want to do, but only after experts and leaders assure them that they have no choice. They want extreme events to make the choice for them. That's why every discussion of torture always descends into some absurd hypothetical where you know that there's a ticking time bomb and you know that a terrorist in your custody has info and you know that you can get that info and stop that bomb if you torture him. They devise these incredibly complex scenarios because they need them to take away their personal choice. That's why writers like Spencer Ackerman exist, to present the proper level of squeamishness and showy moral grappling-- to say that these scenes "can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American"-- before the torture happens anyway. The key is to go through the moral indigestion but to eventually get to the all-American pride. There's a whole cottage industry, like that, for fretting liberals who want to get to the tough guy routine in the end.
• How it works.
• Mr Kristof and his others.
• Applied anarchy, part three.
• Martial fucking law.
• If I were president.
• When Glen Baxter cartoons go horribly wrong.
• To know is not to know.
• Bleggalgazing.
• Navel gazing, or: why I'm glad I'm bad at subject/object/object/subject....
• Becoming a redwood.
• Henry Moore documentary.
• Poetry versus philosophy.
• Today's U.S. Route is 36, which can be used to get to Bamgier, where I'll be in ten days, yay!
• Was going to do a Killdozer cascade today until news of Rosen's death yesterday. Will next post or two. If you've Killdozer requests, let me know. Alternatively, fuck that.
• Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to do lists, but this one is excellent, not least because their number one is one of my favorites of the year, but also because dig this review of Anaal Nathrakh's Vanitas: Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! RIP MY FUCKING HEAD OFF AND USE IT AS A FUCKING KICK BALL, THEN STICK IT IN A FUCKING CANNON AND SHOOT IT INTO FUCKING OUTER FUCKING SPACE!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! MY HEAD WILL HIT AN ASTEROID AND REDIRECT IT TO THE EARTH!!!! RRRRRRRRRRRRR AAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY FACE AND BRAINS AND FUCKING HAIR WILL MOLD AND MELT INTO THE FUCKING ASTEROID THAT IS NOW SPEEDING TOWARDS THE FUCKING MISERABLE PLANET FAIL FUCKING EARTH AND RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!!Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! SEND THIS FUCKING CD TO ME WITH A WARHEAD ATTACHED TO IT!!! FUCKING DIE!!! Anaal Nathrakh!!! FUCKING RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Actually, that's a fan ordering Vanitas, here's the review itself.
• Of fire and fucking pigs. More later.
• Helio Sequence.
• Elliott Carter born 104 years ago today. Click on the Elliott Carter tag for the recent cascades in celebration of his music after his recent passing.
• Rosen and Carter in conversation.
• RIP Charles Rosen.

FUCK THE ASTRONAUTS

James Tate

I

Eventually we must combine nightmares
an angel smoking a cigarette on the steps
of the last national bank, said to me.
I put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that
cheap talk I’ve got my own problems.
It was sad, exciting, and horrible.
It was exciting, horrible, and sad.
It was horrible, sad, and exciting.
It was inviting, mad, and deplorable.
It was adorable, glad, and enticing.
Eventually we must smoke a thumb
cheap talk I’ve got my own angel
on the steps of the problems the bank
said to me I don’t need that.
I will take this one window
with its sooty maps and scratches
so that my dreams will remember
one another and so that my eyes will not
become blinded by the new world.

II

The flames don’t dance or slither.
They have painted the room green.
Beautiful and naked, the wives
are sleeping before the fire.
Now it is out. The men have
returned to the shacks,
slaved creatures from the forest
floor across their white
stationwagons. That just about
does it, says the other, dumping her bucket
over her head. Well, I guess
we got everything, says one,
feeling around in the mud,
as if for a child.
Now they remember they want
that mud, who can’t remember
what they got up for.
They parcel it out: when
they are drunk enough
they go into town with
a bucket of mud, saying
we can slice it up into
windmills like a bloated cow.
Later, they paint the insides
of the shack black,
and sit sucking eggs all night,
they want something real, useful,
but there isn’t anything.

III

I will engineer the sunrise
they have disassembled our shadows
our echoes are erased from the walls
your nipples are the skeletons of olives
your nipples are an oriental delight
your nipples blow away like cigarette papers
your nipples are the mouths of mutes
so I am not here any longer
skein of lightning
memory’s dark ink in your last smile
where the stars have swallowed their train schedule
where the stars have drowned in their dark petticoats
like a sock of hamburger
receiving the lightning
into his clitoris
red on red the prisoner
confesses his waltz
through the corkscrew lightning
nevermind the lightning
in your teeth let’s waltz
I am the hashish pinball machine
that rapes a piano.

Our Slow Crop Is Used Up within an Hour

RIP Dick Whittington, my step-father-in-law. He was a good guy. We weren't close, we were tangents, tertiaries by obligation, but he was a good guy. I hope he thought me a good guy, I'm told he did, but what else are people going to say. He made it to his wife's memorial service two months ago (he was on a train to see her before she died when she died), summoned lucidity out of his alzheimered mind, movement out of his atrophied legs, was as much his old self in handling the necessities and services as he had been in years. In between their deaths a composer and poet who are touchstones died. I created a tag Death, wish I hadn't need use it so much since Death's tag's birth.

• On the both-sides-suck dismissal.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• American diplomacy.
• Definitions and distinctions part one, part two.
• Kiss of death.
• Who's your daddy?
• Terry Fucking McAuliffe? Fucking Democratic Party zombies.
• A few minutes with Ben Olsen.
• A few minutes with Dave Kasper.
• A few minutes with Kevin Payne.
• UPDATE! Goodbye, Branko, we hardly knew you.
• I, for one, mourn the loss of Maryland's traditional rivalries with Syracuse and Pitt.
• Your Fucking Washington Post: Stupid or disingenuous? Let me rephrase that: more stupid than disingenuous or visa versa?
• Silliman's always awesome litlinks.
• Ross' music links.
• Ammons and Hass.
• UPDATE! My formative years.
• Houses of the Holy.
• The only two things missing in Bach are randomness and sex. 

TEMPLATE

Jack Gilbert

Our slow crop is used up within an hour. So I live
effortlessly by the ocean, where the sun bestows
and bestows and I return nothing. Go cross-grain through
the fire and call my style lust. But the night forces me.
I get so quiet lying under the stars I can't regulate
the sound of owls altering me. In that dark in front
of the house, I often think of an old man at Sadler's Wells.
The only one left who had seen the famous dances.
When they did them again, despite the bad notation,
he would watch patiently, saying, No, no that's not the way
it was somehow. Until they got it right. But he died.

I Will Retreat to the Precorporate

Wishful thinking, this post's title. Saturday bleggalgazing: I'd promised to post all Elliott Carter requests and I'm happy to do so today, not intentionally on the slowest day of the week in Blegsylvania but because I had an attack of Mekons. I promised to post all Mekons requests, I promise to get to them next post. Since it is the slowest day of the week I will reveal this much: for privacy reasons I can't write about the details of my conversation about the election with a smart and reliable and generous human who's also a devout and distraught young conservative this past Wednesday morning beyond saying it was horrifying and heartbreaking and I'll remember it always, but I also find I can't write about it in tablet without sounding the condescending ass. I'm a dope at the other end of the tug-of-war rope at Corporate's once every four years company picnic too even if I didn't play this year for varsity, just applauded the other side's varsity losing. As just proven, in trying to be bigger I make myself smaller.

• My rage is a life force, part 1.
• Would love to be proven wrong, but no. 
• The ecstasy of Ned. Elric brought home a homeless Ned once.
• I'm hearing this thesis a lot: The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.” This will be President Obama’s epitaph for future historians. Orchestrating the election like a World Wrestling Federation melodrama, the Tea Party’s sponsors threw billions of dollars into the campaign to cast the President’s party in the role of “good cop” against stereotyped opponents attacking women’s rights, Hispanics and nearly every other hyphenated-American interest group. The irony being that I've yodeled for four years that Obama would run for reelection by appealing to peoples' fear of a greater Crackerstan, I never thought that Corporate, Rightwing Division, would spend so much to help Obama win.
• Of course he'll name this fucker.
• Is this child dead enough for you?
• David Harvey interview.
• Postcolonial melancholia.
• Left Side of the Aisle #81. 
• I call bullshit. 
• Rules for living.
• Space Clinton wins the election.

• Theses on monsters. I know I've asked before but I've never had time, please tell me where to start if I wanted to get Mieville.
• HEY! DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn't spy on you.
• Anne Sexton was born 84 years ago yesterday.
• Music swims back to me.
• Unknown girl in the maternity world.
• The greatest academic fraud of his generation. I say that admiringly.
• Saturday bleggalgazing - some new additions to Because Left, Because Right, and Listening, please check them out. As always, if you are doing me a Kind but me not you, please let me know.
• Philip Roth says he's done. The strangest relationship I have with an author: I read everything, like it when reading it, can't remember a damn thing about it. I'd always thought this an effect of Roth's prolific output, but Harrington was almost as prolific for a matching two decades and wrote about the same place with the same characters over and over and I can remember each novel as distinct, I can't say that about my memory of Roth's novels. I went through a massive Iris Murdoch phase in my early twenties, no one wrote the same novel over and over as often as Iris Murdoch, I can still separate each in my head, it's been twenty years at least since I've read one. It's true I felt obligated to read each of Roth's new novels, but I felt obligated to read each of Updike's, and I can remember distinctions between each of them. Anyway.
• Terry Riley on film. I haven't played enough Riley here, will fix soon.

THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GHOSTS

Tom Clark

Whoso list to haunt could do worse than to
Obtain the license, get the picture.
Spook finders must find spooks to put the face,
Name and space coordinates together.
What is kept in the mind perimeter
Retains a wild autonomy through fate.

I will retreat to the precorporate.
Let fate have what is fate's and allow
This spirit to slip through time's difficult
Nets with the devious fingers of
A wild wind, while I run along behind.

No Use Standing There Like a Gray Stone Toga as the Whole Wheel of Recorded History Flashes Past, Struck Dumb, Unable to Utter an Intelligent Comment on the Most Thought-Provoking Element in Its Train

OK, I voted. HEY! no photos! so just the above. I can vouch that Jill Stein has two votes in Maryland. Silly and safe and upside-down and futile and self-serving, sure, maybe her getting 5% of the national vote is a daydream, but it'd be nice for Greens to get federal funding in 2016. George Gluck has two votes too. Yes on Four and Six and I held my nose and yessed Seven if for no other reason than the jobs might as well stay in state since people are going to gamble one way or the other. I'd like to thank the Romney electioneer standing between a pro-Romney sign and an anti-Seven sign, his vest festooned with anti-Seven buttons, who was quietly (so Obama electioneers twenty yards away couldn't hear) telling an elderly black lady she needed photo ID to vote - she'd misplaced her drivers license, couldn't find it in her purse. I told her to follow me, she voted in front of me, I probably would have yessed Seven without the Romney assclown, but he clinched the deal. The woman waited at the door to thank me. I had the pleasure of hearing her tell the fucking cracker to fuck off on the way out. He was unmoved, proud even, the motherfucker.

Now, important matters: more Elliott Carter. He wrote a number of pieces based on poems by American poets. Here's a piece based on John Ashbery's poem Syringa:



   




I've got requests from friend Ethan I'll post tomorrow, I'm still waiting to hear from Randal, I'm having our much postponed dinner with Hamster in a couple of hours, I hope to get requests from him, requests gladly accepted.

The Perfect Voter Has a Smile but No Eyes

Elliott Carter died yesterday. He changed the way I listen to music. There will be much here the next few days. As for POTUS and today and tomorrow, I found it tremendously funny and charming that when I went searching for Carter works last night the youtube you might like this too algorithm came up with Mazzy Star which I love love love too, look, here's a screen shot to prove it.

• Nobody knows anything.
• Election Day.
• Oh, POTUS today and tonight. I went to vote local issues this morning, the line was 350 deep, out the door of the elementary school across the street from my house, I said Fuck That, I'll vote this afternoon. People at work report long lines at their precincts.
• Any doubts who this fucker is gonna vote for?
• The cruel majority.
• Put alternatively.
• UPDATE! Just got a phone call from Bamgier - someone has cancelled one Romney vote.
• Ginormous pile of crap. Posted as much to mention I'd completely forgot about Somerby, not out of malice or intent, I just did.
• Vote.
• What is an American political party?
• On conventional Villager wisdom.
• You do realize whichever side loses will think the election stolen, yes?
• The fascist push. 
• Motherfucking nuts. I've never said they're not motherfucking nuts.
• Motherfucking Republicans. I've never said they're not vile motherfuckers.
• UPDATE! On the above.
• In a career full of asinine punditry, Pastor Sanctimonious wrote his stupidest column yesterday.
• Why I voted the Socialist ticket.
• Conservatives taken for a ride by Romney. He's a corporatist, not a conservative.
• Learning to talk to Southern white men.
• Cue the permanent campaign.
• Leftist liberalism?

• Election Year.
• Joyce Carol Oates on the election.
• Beckett, for those of you who do. 
• Why are poets aligned with the Left?
• Children of our era.
• C.K. Williams and Jack Gilbert poems, plus more.
• I've assigned myself learning about and listening to Richard Maxfield, who I've never heard of until now.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Elliott Carter.
• Elliott Carter.
• Elliott Carter.
• Elliott Carter.

EXQUISITE POLITICS

Denise Duhamel

The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,
maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,
maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.
Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.
Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth
of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,
anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.
I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,
resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric
languages. I sat on Alice's mushroom in Central Park,
smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor's mansion.
Someday I won't politic anymore, my big heart will stop
loving America and I'll leave her as easy as a marriage,
splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage
before the other side yells: Wow! America,
Vespucci's first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.

Elliott Carter

1908-2012
  

Elliott Carter's Music of Time