Blessed, One Syllable, Two

New Chris Watson, found just now at Quietus. Blessed Serendipity - this past Saturday I listened to El Tren Fantisma. More Watson here. More Watson here. Blessed Serendipity knows what I need and provides, sometimes.

Never Mind That We Could Only Grow Gray Things

Nobody claimed the Elkin when it was offered a few days ago, but Dalkey Press sent me an email yesterday saying it had shipped both Part One and Part Two of Marguerite Young's Miss McIntosh, My Darling after an representative emailed me last week saying Dalkey was out of Part Two, was unlikely to get more, did I want another title, and  I asked for a Stanley Elkin The Franchiser with the intention - hence the offer - of giving it away here. (And I ordered, and already received, Part Two through an evil motherfucker's company, I've never denied here my complicity.) So if I get The Franchiser it's still available to claim, if I get Part Two of Miss McIntosh, My Darling, it's yours if you want, why would you want Part Two of a novel I've no idea, I'll no doubt own two until I next bag up books and give to local public library to sell when I'm clearing out shelf space for more books.

UPDATE! Dalkey just sent me a $1.20 refund on my purchase, the exact difference between Elkin's The Franchiser and Part Two of Miss McIntosh, so I assume I'm getting the Elkin, which Jim claimed this morning in comments.

• Chris Watson interview.
• Look who's alive!
• I'd written about the Coke ad during the Helmet Bowl where America the Beautiful was sang in different languages by different ethnic groups and my knee-jerk reaction that it was a transparently bathetic appeal to gross patriotism and others knee-jerk reaction that singing America the Beautiful in any language other than English is a traitorous sin, but I've abbreviated it to this sentence which ends with the two words fuck it.
• It comes back to where it comes back.
• How to begin from the beginning, by his generation's greatest academic fraud, and I say that admiringly.
• Been a while since I did that gag, but then it's been a while since I've seen anything new from Žižek.
• On the Dylan Chrysler ads.
• Map of Georgetown 2028.
• White Oak!
• 2100 words on why DCU should play a diamond 4-4-2.
• I cannot wait until this summer when The Special One quits Chel$ki to take over for The Beloved But Fired Saint Benny. The Special One makes me root for Chel$ki, I cannot emphasize how big a feat that is.
• On reactive football.

• I'm told my father and brother and wife were mocking my music this past Saturday. Finding the Chris Watson interview an hour ago is why there are field recordings here today. The mocking is just a side benefit.

• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Joyce's birthday was last Sunday.
• Two days late too, New Inquiry's Sunday Readings.
• Handke, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.

• I don't begrudge The Cure for continuing to make a living being The Cure, but meh.
• Something I missed three days ago: Destination:Out is closing up shop.
• Why Bach moves us? Not all of us, though I don't think you nuts if he moves you though many I've met in life think I'm crazy I'm not of the body too.
• Morton Feldman, for those of you who do. Those of you who don't should. I don't think I'd heard that piece before. Yes, this will shorten the time between my last Feldman fix and the next, but it's not today, click on the label for more.
• Prunella's latest playlist, for those of you who do. Those of you who don't should.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR/1

Matthea Harvey

The generalissimo’s glands directed him

to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon

we called God, and we were off to the races.

Never mind that we could only grow

gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums

in the gymnasium predicted a jagged

road ahead. We were tired of hard news—

it helped to turn down our hearing aids.

We could already all do impeccable imitations

of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on

a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.

That much was true. When we got jaded

about joyrides, we could always play games

in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.

Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick

the Kidney were our favorites. The laws

the linguists thought up were particularly

lissome, full of magical loopholes that

spit out medals. We had made the big time,

but night still nipped at our heels.   

The navigator’s needle swung strangely,

oscillating between the oilwells

and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves

together by practicing quarterback sneaks

along the pylons, but the race to the ravine

was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s

and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight

of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

The Clouds Were Pretending to Be Clouds When in Fact They Were Overheard Comments Regarding His Recent Behavior

My insomnia and Serendipity brings you the above highlights of a Manchester football club you don't have to hate. Yesterday I saw and at three o'clock this morning remembered and read this Guardian article on FC United of Manchester, who play in the Northern Premier League, the seventh tier of English football. Here's the current table:

1.	Skelmersdale	19	13	2	4	41:27	41
2.	Chorley	17	12	4	1	39:12	40
3.	Fylde	18	10	5	3	41:14	35
4.	Worksop	18	11	2	5	55:43	35
5.	Marine	20	8	8	4	37:30	32
6.	Blyth	20	9	5	6	33:31	32
7.	Kings Lynn	19	9	4	6	38:27	31
8.	Matlock	19	9	4	6	29:20	31
9.	Ilkeston	21	9	4	8	38:30	31
10.	Buxton	18	8	5	5	26:20	29
11.	United of Manche...	17	8	4	5	34:21	28
12.	Grantham	19	8	4	7	36:32	28
13.	Rushall	17	8	4	5	25:29	28
14.	Whitby	20	6	9	5	32:31	27
15.	Barwell	21	7	5	9	30:35	26
16.	Ashton	18	6	6	6	33:30	24
17.	Nantwich	20	6	5	9	32:29	23
18.	Witton	17	6	3	8	29:27	21
19.	Frickley	20	5	6	9	28:33	21
20.	Trafford	18	6	3	9	27:34	21
21.	Stamford	19	5	3	11	28:44	18
22.	Stocksbridge	20	3	4	13	34:56	13
23.	Stafford	19	2	3	14	20:52	9
24.	Droylsden	18	0	2	16	12:70	2

About an hour ago blogfriend Hamish Mack retweeted the above video highlights of yesterday's FCUM v Frickley game which includes a spectacular own goal, so Serendipity must be honored with this post.

While I'm here, have Maggie's weekly links and { feuilleton }'s weekly links and Joyce dug Defoe and hear Anne Lauterbach read her poems and this lovely piece on the death of a cat and sanctuary and RIP Doris Lessing (who I read dutifully decades ago, it wasn't love it wasn't hate) and Hilary Mantel's review of Lessing's autobiography.






STAY

Franz Wright

The clouds were pretending to be clouds
when in fact they were overheard comments
regarding his recent behavior, but muffled

as though heard through a wall. Unlike
the personal messages being conveyed to him
in the form of asides by people on TV, chilling

in their clam and unequivocal malevolence.
In the garden the roses were opening,
chanting in unison, My name is Mary and

you really don't want to come near me,
not if I was the last little swastika nympho
on earth, and what was that supposed to mean!

Then there the others who lived there.
(Was he living there now?) They were indifferent
to him with the very striking exception of

two friends. He could tell they were friends
by the marked improvement in their mood
when his was at its most truly desolate.

Secretly Each Is Devoted to the Conviction that It Is Irreparably Different from All the Rest - in Fact, It Is This in Which They Are Most Fundamentally Alike

• No Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend, barring kaboom I'm squelching jones until Monday. Or not; or not.
• Against the Death of the Novel.
• Which spurred this post.
• Danto's The Artworld.
• Art thieves and gurus.
• Game theory and The Price is Right.
• There are new places in Newest Gags First and Second, please check them out as they float to the top. Thanks for the Kind to those of you who've floated me recently on yours. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
• Neruda, for those of you who do. 
• Vollmann: self-images of a cross-dresser. 
• Return of Scuba-Dog.
• Melville's secrets. (h/t wood s lot, who you should ping daily)
• I confess I may not have given Franz Wright a fair chance because of who his father is, but "book of our time?" That's today's edition of thank Baal I have access to a university library's stacks.  
• Pere Ubu in Cork.
• No, not that Phavid Dillips:

LAMP

Franz Wright

Evening street of midnight blue with here and there a lighted window. Of the at home, or possible not. Concentrically into the air whose blue sphere gradually gives way to pure lethal space, wave after wave of a pale cadmium yellow expanding into emptiness and past the blood-brain barrier. Lamp manufactured unwittingly in the image of its make the mind, which goes on emitting dim rays from its frail bulb of skull, from its insignificant and evidently random sector of an infinite place all its own; mind illuminating not much: seen, say, from its own frozen and excommunicated Pluto, it is nearly indistinguishable from any other. All minds are pretty much the same, they'll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest - in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike.





  

THE UNFOLLOWING 51, 56, 62, 71, 72

Lyn Hejinian

51

Afloat in a glass-bottom boat, I see into the sea—a miniscule emerald 
     memento
That the strongest social bonds are forged by language doesn’t nullify
             the power that dancing around the puppet effigies of the men
             in power has
On the solemn face of the glinting belly is a button baby
You have to know how to roll on the horizon
Followers follow, possibles possibulate, coruscations consider, blood
             coagulates

An allegory is a depiction of something that can’t be depicted
Mathias Madrid thrusts his fist toward his face in a mirror, Millicent
             Malcolm pets a faithful falcon on a perch, Margaret Mason
             makes fig jam to serve on cold toast with hard cheese
The pyrotechnical expanse, lacking azure, makes do with blatant
             blackness, unspoken light
Winter’s cover’s curled back by adjectives—whacking winter’s roadside
             cover
Stained owls and up over the ill rabbits they fly
Several hours go by but hours are impossible to perceive
I market, am marketed, mark, remark
We walk down a street under windows that let in noise that might
             prompt someone asleep in the room to dream of drummers,
             flautists, a man on stilts with a tuba, a sextet of giggling girls
What is it ghosts wonder?
   

56

It should not be strange to be a woman rewarded
Letters click as they wander, shift as they ascend, their altitudes attain
             autobiography
Next you are like dry steps’ passing sound and fall, and then you are
             like sweetened grapefruit

Everything applies in the hyper-patterning that retrospect
             attempts and to which the irreverent response is “How
             splay!”
In the small houses of the children in the house there are always
             complex simplicities and one was a vast pink stuffed
             equine thing called Star
Wet Brahms
Revocation of harm
By moving from window to window and carefully recording at
             each what we see, we...*
It is time you were told of the time I failed to defend the bull and
             indeed rejoiced in its murder
This is not hypocritical!
The statue at its fullest is emptiest of meaning
She speaks to another not about sex but about a particular game
             of truth
Sonorousness facilitates the descent of sunny motes from the
             ponderosa
Dancers have fleas—or, shall we say that fleas live on the planet
             of dancers?
   

62

Into the disordered shortening of a circle comes this little fury,
              this abdicated panic, this dirty Venus, this resemblance
              to nothing we know of the dead
Sky simultaneous bud, cavity contemporaneous slight
And from the tree a ripe peach falls and a puff of dust rises,
              gently circles, drifts, spreads, holds its shape, dissipates,
              and settles under the tree again and on the weeds nearby
Once there was a woman I’ll name another day and in her care
              were eight well-matched strong pelicans who flew low
              over the sea in careful configurations that brought her
              aesthetic pleasure and more fish than she or they could
              eat
Life is rife with erasure and time is rich with delay
Immediately the eater spots some defects (bits of meat, scraps of green)
No, I did not forget the sad vagrant shuffling about in his red

              speckled secrecy and I will never do so again!
You’ve been boasting of your cantaloupe pottage, you’ve provided
              us with thin toast, your glory increases all about you
Hush—ssshh—what is it?
The ancestor wandered toward the horizon, he craved
              recognition, but eons went by and he landed in a circus,
              there being no other work for a man from the gloom of
              origins
Cousins are composite, constructed, compared
Quick, lively, assembled ripples monitor, mosquitoes spill, and
              the children dine on candy
The sky is another point, this time of ambiguous blue
Why didn’t I think of that?
      

71

A grasshopper singing of death laughs long—as if a heavy-
             hearted granny spoke a light word
A shadow scuds over glass, the glass stands still
Insects seethe and they say that is the dream of language but
             what is language if not what is threading through the
             veins of an insect’s wings
What does it mean to say “now” now, as now surfaces in a gesture,
             as of a person pushing his eyeglasses up toward his brow
Our luggage is stacked sky-high, we are wearing twenty layers of
             clothes, every utterance is symphonic
I’ve never made curtains for these windows, stabbed by the mid-
             morning light
I pass with a broom, standing with a hose in my hand and my
             thumb against the nozzle
The loops of time droop, fall slack—and someone steps out of
             those that were his or hers, hers or his, his and hers, his
             and his, hers and hers—is it right, then, that we are left
             to hurtle alone
The girls danced in dead light, the cadavers lay in live light—but
             as for those girls, men with mouths like mare vaginas
             watched them

Every rough rupture demands elasticity of the imagination
The silver river is irreversible but you attentively watch its mouth
What you write achieves its independence though you are nimble,
             arrogant, sly and wise.
That is how you spend the day, which is itself a powerful force
             and raises the significant question “How did you get
             here?”
All suffering is in the egg—now suck it out of its shell and spit
             it away

72

Collective longer literature appeals to cloud variants over a
             crowd
See the gang, going to Alabama, tonguing cones, singing waka
             wasa bong
The robust thrush it is, stately as royalty, common as a
             pickpocket at a concert
I will not, I say, rest, I say, rotate
Let’s go now to the very next neologism and term it
             fragmentarily
Desperate he was to cry out and couldn’t, to say what he knew
             and know it
This takes adults—and very far indeed
The saxophonist breathes, takes a breath, inhales, gasps
Armadillo, yellow shovel, and empty oval
I sprawl across a bed strewn with breadcrumbs, ah ha!
At echo’s edge, a rock wall rises, a monument to leisure
The mourner chortles, she’s like a clown with sandpaper, at
             sorrow’s involuntary humor
Her remarks, his remarks, their remarks, our remarks, my
             remarks, your remarks betray
Oh there is a blading in this gentle bend

and having spent some moments thinking of the vision that accommodates all that is unforeseen

Friday on his message board during his Friday show I asked Bryce for advice on works and musicians to continue my latest compulsion for field-recordings, I don't know if he did it for me or because of me but the last set of the show was KABOOM! thanks! I posted a Forcucci piece yesterday, below is one of the Yannick Dauby pieces he played, above one I found. Holy the fuck, I have never listened to sound better in my life, I have never been hungrier for sounds I've never heard in my life, and everything is music. I was trained to categorize and discriminate. I'm unlearning that shit.

• Music is feeling.
• A photo-tour of Ostkreuz. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The first thing the baby did wrong.
• Trapped inside the novel. A response to this Tim Parks' piece I posted Friday: This conviction puts me decisively in the camp represented by Parks, the camp that admires Beckett and Bernhard.  But I wish this camp spent less time on Dawkins-like denunciations of its outgroup, a libidinal investment that leads it to mistake friends for enemies and to narrow its canon unduly. Fine metaphors abound.
• On the roll out of the new Arcade Fire album. Know what, fuck it. I'm tired of being a scold, of administering purity tests, my ears are sluts, who am I to judge? An added benefit? I care less about passing the purity tests I used to apply to and then worry about myself.
• Different mileage, mind, here and there, more or less, now and then, more failure than success, but there is a project in progress.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• An anti-Best of 2013 Best of 2013 list.
• Figures in a landscape, III.
• I haven't forgot Britten's centenary in twelve days:

UNDER THE SIGN

Ann Lauterbach

Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent

need, she
conducting us through intolerable

passages, now forgotten, I
have burned my right hand

after sunset
small dark clouds above

the river I cannot see
while listening to

a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that

certain passages
rapidly repeat

and having spent some moments
thinking of the the vision

that accommodates
all that is unforeseen

as the world now
becomes without sequence.

The Forty-Eight Keys of the Typewriter, Each an Eyeball That Is Never Shut

• Saturday's field-recording by Luca Forcucci. Field-recording requests for artists and pieces earnestly solicited. This is new to me. I've learned I really want to learn more.
• Thanks to everyone who sent Kind words via various methods re: Earthgirl and Planet's art. I've passed it on. Will post more occasionally, every few months or so. They both have blogs over in Me and Mine though both blogs have been dormant. Both say that's going to change. We'll see.
• Anthony's given his blog an excellent makeover. The content is why you should visit daily. This normally would lead to me whining about fucking blooger and my dead template button, but fuck it.
• We, the public (existing in your own word).
• After Sebalds' Austerlitz: Karen Stuke's photography.
• Sebald poem.
• Earthgirl lets me play Daniel Menche on trips to and from Ohio! I know I've played him here within the past few months. I like.
• The Book of Elements.
• Anne Sexton was born 85 years ago today. There's a story about a woman and Anne Sexton's poetry and my initiation into women and poetry which I've just told you all I'm ever going to tell you whether you're a digital or analog friend. There's a story Tony Hecht told me about Tony Hecht and Anne Sexton (and Hecht praised Sexton's poetry) which I won't tell here but if you ask me when you see me I'll tell you.

THE ROOM OF MY LIFE

Anne Sexton

Here,

in the room of my life

the objects keep changing.

Ashtrays to cry into,

the suffering brother of the wood walls,

the forty-eight keys of the typewriter

each an eyeball that is never shut,

the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,   

the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,   

the sockets on the wall

waiting like a cave of bees,

the gold rug

a conversation of heels and toes,

the fireplace

a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,

the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,   

the phone

two flowers taking root in its crotch,

the doors

opening and closing like sea clams,

the lights

poking at me,

lighting up both the soil and the laugh.

The windows,

the starving windows

that drive the trees like nails into my heart.   

Each day I feed the world out there

although birds explode

right and left.

I feed the world in here too,

offering the desk puppy biscuits.

However, nothing is just what it seems to be.   

My objects dream and wear new costumes,

compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands   

and the sea that bangs in my throat.

ALL MY PRETTY ONES

Anne Sexton

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,   

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber   

you from the residence you could not afford:   

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,   

the love and legal verbiage of another will,   

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,   

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...   

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy   

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.   

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile   

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.   

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.   

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly   

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran   

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went   

down and recent years where you went flush   

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant   

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.   

But before you had that second chance, I cried   

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.   

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,   

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,   

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;   

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;   

and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.   

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,   

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept   

for three years, telling all she does not say   

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day   

with your blood, will I drink down your glass   

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years   

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.   

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.   

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.