The Green Rooms of the Abandonarium

• Fifth draft, last draft, I promise myself. Bigger here.
• A friend gave me a copy of Sergio de la Pava's new novel Lost Empress, I've been waiting impatiently, I'd heard good things, and admired if not exactly liked de la Pava's Naked Singularity, and I obviously agree with anyone who thinks motherfucking helmetball a Prime metaphor for the - this is the last time I do this until the next - American clusterfuckocene.
• I'm 0 for 3 ABs v Lost Empress all on called strikes.
• It's sloppy, self-indulgent, loud, disorganized, impressed with display over content, the fucker.
• I cut the above page out of Tablet - I promised myself no more tablet talk here - and I cut it out without thinking about it - I thought, this is too close to the page gap, I'll never scan that right - but I just up and cut tablet, I am telling you three times....
• Fourth at bat I broke my bat and squiggled a shitty infield hit, but it will still be a hit in the box score. 

• There's new Fennesz:
• Wooden Boy: a conversation.
• Devastatingly human.
• The African Anthropocene.
• Today in Motherfucking Democrats.
• Mothering under capitalism.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• Straw man seeks brain.
• Totally naked with wild dogs.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Posthumous oblivion.
• Stoner.
• Octopus. Stop eating them.
• Yes, I know Brock-Broido died a few months back.

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

Claustrophobic Rainbow Spectrums which Empty Themselves and Return to Themselves Like Having an Image Go Out and Return to Itself so that Its Power Transmutes by the Very Energy of Its Looping

However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction.

László Krasznahorkai, Satantango


László Krasznahorkai is sixty-one today and today is the newest Egoslavian Holy Day. I haven't written about my reading slump in weeks if not months because I'm not in one, and Krasznahorkai is one important reason. In the past eighteen months I've read Melancholy of Resistance and War and War - I recommend the latter before the former though I recommend both - and I just finished Satantango. If I like you and you say please I'll mail you one of the above, your choice. I don't do reviews and long-form here because I didn't like writing reviews and long-form when I was required to, the fuck if I'm going to do it here: in sparing me I am sparing you. Please check out the links I provided for reviews and long-forms and an interview. I will say I recognize in Krasznahorkai's infinitely ominous and claustrophobic world the world I am only now beginning to realize I live in.

• I promised a Fennesz cascade this past Saturday. I only found out Krasznahorkai's birthday was today last night. Serendipity SZ.
• Migratory: we are alone.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Nostalgia of the day.
• No point clicking the Krasznahorkai tag today - I just created it. Will be useful in the future.
• Winter's Philosophers.
• On the novels of Joshua Ferris. I have no idea who Joshua Ferris is, but the review is good anyway.
• Meredith Monk and the sovereign identity of 21st C music.
• George Harrison's brief excursion into experimental electronic music.

ON ANTI-BIOGRAPHY

Will Alexander

For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.

Me, I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.

It is the non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and the mind guided by stars.

So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage, like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions, would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass, staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.  

Fa, The Liar

Sure, this is evening attention-sluttery, but I promised the new Fennesz either today or tomorrow and I didn't remember earlier today that tomorrow is an Egoslavian Holy Day (expect Boulez piano pieces and Robert Frost poems), here, have the new Fennesz now. I promise myself a full cascade this weekend, in meantime have this, my favorite (once I could find a youtube that had a crane draining a swamp while song played, fuck, it's gone), it's love love love. *!O!* Loud as fuck please.

words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind

   
Yesterday morning on 270 south, on the curve to the left at the split at the spur, the Matrix hit 200K miles. I always liked the car's dashboard looks like a United uniform. The transmission is starting to go, and I'll not sink more than a few hundred dollars into a repair, and the CD player has been busted the last 50K miles and Dvorak's American Suite was what was on WETA at the time, but I gassed it up and Jiffy Lubed it yesterday, it's been an exceptionally reliable car needing just standard maintenance, I feel an obligation to run it into the ground, or at least sensible abandonment.

• More songs for long quiet solo drives over mountains.
• Another person asks, Does Obama think we're stupid?
• Obama on imperial power and total surveillance: If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day,” Obama said, “and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.
• So it's come to this: two links from Politico. Thanks, Obama.
• The surveillance is not about terrorism.
• Police state tango.
• On Lavabit.
• Fine print as capitalism's surrealist masterpiece.
• Privilege and the rhetoric of austerity.
• Maggie's links of the week.

• I walked into the living room yesterday, Planet and Earthgirl are watching some TV show, Captain Janeway is undercover as a old fat Russian inmate in a California prison. No sign of Seven of Nine or Jameway's First Officer Chipotle.
• Potomac drowning machine.
• Watkins Mill interchange!
• { feuilleton }'s links of the week.
• A Language.
• Album - A Runthru.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Celan and Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Malone Dies.
• In the marvelous dimension.
• Seven pieces of HOLYFUCK! 

ARGUMENT OVER, AMOUNTING

Clark Coolidge

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t

the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally

and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan

You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite

your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready

receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat

behind the one you there are

Then the I not part of the you equation, but the

spider trying to build where it is written

vibrates tentative

I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore

crystal region in its light, there are failures and

there are failures

But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the

final catch, trounced morning

this is awful but none other available, words reach

and visually fail to tie audibly retire

the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of

turning aside remind

I am hopefully

this is position

of the world overcome by

and by the wind takes our voice

the collateral one voice

My Ears Begged for Camouflage and the Chance to Go to War

• Mr Charlie requested that song for Ringo's 73rd birthday today.
• When verifying date in Wikipedia I clicked on the Barbara Bach date (I was curious how old she was) and read that Ringo's brother-in-law is Joe Walsh. Today's fact you probably didn't know.
• Mencken on Snowden, Bradley, Assange, etc.... 
• Of course the NSA is listening to everyone in the world. 
• More people read The Guardian than the NYT.
• Why Google killed Google Reader. The latest change that pisses me off: I now have to title posts at DRGDKCLB or I cannot post new content. Then there's the issue I've been wisely advised to not detail here. Then there's motherfucking Google. Then there's the fact that I've asked people to migrate twice already, from blooger to typepad then back to blooger. Then there's the issue that a year or more ago the Update Template button on my blooger dashboard died and I can make no changes to color or fonts if I want to. Then there's the issue that motherfucking blooger is fucking useless at providing help when something breaks. Then there's the issue that Google killed Google Reader and I use bloogers (admittedly excellent) self-updating blogrolls as my bookmarks. Waah.
• I also think blooger has arbitrarily reduced the font size from Times New Roman 11 to Times New Roman 10, though that might just be a combination of illusion and old eyes.
• Though without a doubt blooger is getting skeevier.
• Anyway, if you, or anyone you trust, knows how to work blooger/Google at a far more sophisticated level than me and wants me to buy you (or the person you trust) the book of poetry or CD of your (or the person you trust's) choice in exchange for helping me sort various issues please let me know.
• Passions of the meritocracy.
• We are all John Derbyshire now.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Einstein's bathrobe.
• Self-portrait.
• Someone else like Fennesz.
• Mahler was born 153 years ago today. If I've lost some mwah for the symphonies my mwah for the Lieder has grown. Hamster, you sent me a playlist once? I'm trying to find it, if I do I'll post it.

THE EAR IS AN ORGAN MADE FOR LOVE

E. Ethelbert Miller

It was the language that left us first.
The Great Migration of words. When people
spoke they punched each other in the mouth.
There was no vocabulary for love. Women
became masculine and could no longer give
birth to warmth or a simple caress with their
lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity
and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities
like fog smothering everything in sight. My
ears begged for camouflage and the chance
to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of
how we sound. Someone said it reminded
them of the time Sonny Rollins disappeared.
People spread stories of how the air would
never be the same or forgive. It was the end
of civilization and nowhere could one hear
the first notes of A Love Supreme. It was as
if John Coltrane had never been born.

The Warmth, the Gloom, the Smell of Sweeping Compound Clinging to the Broom Soothed Me

Some requests honored in lieu of daily auto-ecstatic bilge-pumping and scab-scraping, two days in a row this, I dig but not enough yet - I would have titled this post the last line of the poem below but can't honestly. Birthday girl B requests the Cheap Trick, P reminds me that Joey Ramone was born sixty-two (62!) years ago tomorrow, asks me to play what I always play on his birthday, anne requested the Fennesz, three people sent word they loved yesterday's Jane Kenyon poem, two asking for more, so, I've an extra copy of her collected first come first served send an email if you want it.






TROUBLE WITH MATH IN A ONE ROOM COUNTRY SCHOOL

Jane Kenyon

The others bent their heads and started in.

Confused, I asked my neighbor

to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl

who brought raw milk to school from her family’s

herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark,

and on it Christ revealed his beating heart,

holding the flesh back with His wounded hand.

Ann understood division. . . .

Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk

and led me roughly through the class

without a word. My shame was radical

as she propelled me past the cloakroom

to the furnace closet, where only the boys

were put, only the older ones at that.

The door swung briskly shut.

The warmth, the gloom, the smell

of sweeping compound clinging to the broom

soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it

upside down, and sat, hugging my knees.

I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew

from my piano lessons. . . .

and hardened my heart against authority.

And then I heard her steps, her fingers

on the latch. She led me, blinking

and changed, back to the class

Look Down, Being Most Careful Not to See Your Own Eye in the Mirror Underneath, Which Will Appear, Unless Your View Is Right, as a Darkness on the Face of the First Waters

Hey! solely for my sake and giggles, it's time for a bleggal-reset. That's the Official Theme Song of Egoslavia, has been since Day One, I'll get you an Archers of Loaf cascade soon, and because I discovered Eleanor Roosevelt was born 128 years ago today when performing my birthday dredge for material yesterday, have this,






the Official Autoblogography of this blog and the single most posted youtube in the history of this blog, Serendipitious at any and all times, any excuse to play the video is a good excuse. Here, have some politicopsychopathogy: If you wished to characterize the Democrats and the Republicans in terms of true exaggerations, you might say that the Republicans have become the Party of Psychosis while the Democrats have become the Party of Neurosis. The Republicans are psychotic because they have lost contact with reality, and orient their behavior not toward realities but toward fantasies. The Democrats are neurotic because they are aim-inhibited, as an old-fashioned shrink might say: their anxieties, hang-ups, and insecurities mean that they can’t attain satisfaction, since in a basic way they won’t even allow themselves to know what they want. Holyfuck, I'm enjoying POTUS waaaay too much (Obama fucking it up all by himself, not needing any help from us fucking hippies). Rather than document the fucker's fuck-ups again today, have instead: a three hour playlist from my early twenties; Hobsbawm's intro to 2012 edition of Communist Manifesto; via friend Frances a reaction to her brave Missouri adventures in making you ashamed to be a liberal; via friend Greyhoos the angry letters of John Lennon; via friend Biblioklept some info about the guy I've never heard of who just won the Nobel in Literature; via friend Dan thoughts on criticism we don't like; via me my favorite Anthony Hecht poem (Green, plus a bonus because scan; click to enlarge), and more Fennesz. Busy really bad some places, busy really really good others, back tomorrow if we Thursday Night Pints tonight, back soon enough one way or the other.