Like a Streetlamp in a Forest When I'm Lost

I am 9/10ths of the way through Henry James' *The Ambassadors* and will finish it tomorrow if I don't today so the burden of honoring a promise to living and dead former English professors and current and past friends will be honored, and get this, I will read another, though James' misuse of pronouns (any *she* referred to is not necessary the one I was taught it should be - I can only think this is intentionally muddying) is annoying as fuck. More signs of our coming apocalypse - it's closer and coming faster than most of yinz think, yo - embedded, along with the rest of the monologue (whether this gag is temporary or permanent until it isn't TBD) in the grid. Tropical Storm Bertha? Sweet, this will be in my head the next few days





Also too, three days from today is this shitty blog's domain renewal date, nothing has changed payment-wise at my end and though the blogging platform continues self-enshittification apace I expect them to take my money and renew me another year, but if I'm not here Saturday.... Hey! Lambchop has released a third song from upcoming album *Punching the Clown,* full album drops a month from yesterday

When the government starts making lists, nothin good ever comes
Today's ➥ monologue	Strange world that my yodels haven't changed but more colleagues and friends and family members no longer think I'm so batshit crazy. Required gag: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, what world?
US police now armed with Israeli spy vans simulating mobile phone towers
"The United States is stuck in a war it started, cannot end, and may further escalate to no avail, having dismantled its diplomatic apparatus, depleted its military stockpile, and destroyed its credibility"
Today's ➥ monologue	Shitlords are happy to waste trillions of dollars on the Iran War if it helps speed up the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare and every fucking thing in the safety net plus the theft of every peasants retirement funds, I said to my ex-polisci professor and friendly acquaintance and for the third time in a row after calling me smart but batshit crazy for decades he said I'm probably right
☞	Faced With Piles of New Paperwork, People Are Losing Food Stamps
Today's ➥ monologue	If shitlords didn't want Trump fucking up everything he touches they wouldn't be letting him touch everything
☞	They Didn't Just Buy Politicians: They Bought Your Food, Your Health, Your Future, and They're Coming for What's Left
☞	Welcome to your Christian Nationalist diarrhea salad
Trump Didn’t Create America’s Authoritarianism—He Exposed It
"So the U.S. has gotten itself into a situation where the State Department is now warning Americans about traveling...anywhere"
And it goes on		Nested machine		Eight tribes?		Everyone Is a Foreign Agent Now
A Communiqué from an Author of Harmful and Undesirable Literature
They are building data centers on top of enslaved people in Stafford County VA
"If you have watched even ten minutes of this Maine candidate debate and still don't understand why Graham Platner was compelling to a vast majority of Maine voters regardless of his red flags you are actively trying to pretend not to. This is legitimately painful to watch."
Today's ➥ monologue	Psst! The "red flags," yes red-red & flaggy, are not the main reason Graham Platner was executed by top Democrats
Soon It Will Be Illegal To Oppose Imperialism
No One Is Taking John Roberts Seriously Anymore
Today's ➥ monologue	No, question is not whether Democratic politicians are listening, the question is when will a majority of people understand that Democrats are just fine with this SCOTUS, it's their job
United States of Assholes				Becoming the stranger
Gaza is ours,' says Ben Gvir as he joins Israeli ministers in march demanding return of settlements
"When Spain defeated Argentina 1-0 in extra time to claim the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the Global South did not simply celebrate a sporting triumph. It executed a coordinated geopolitical signal—an improvised, transnational act of anti-colonial resistance that exposed Western double standards, punished Argentina’s embrace of Israel, and elevated an unlikely European nation as a moral proxy for Palestinian solidarity"
Democrats Fail Because They Won’t Name The Villains
Today's ➥ monologue	Democrats fail because it's their job to fail
Today's ➥ monologue	"Funny how “stories diverging” is a regular feature on the Democrat side of the Maine Senate race, isn’t it? Note that the Bangor Daily News either pulls its punches or CNN is misreporting. It’s almost as if the national Democrats would rather lose the race (and the Senate), because for them, “winning” means keeping access to the money flow that defines their party"
Spectacles of Fascism in an Age of Exhaustion
"Good morning to everyone but Chair Comer, who is presiding over the markup of H.R. 9720 today, the WORST attack on Home Rule by this Congress so far. Free DC and friends are in the House"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
Little Red Scare 2.0				Trump's Big Myth
Maggie		Suing Stephen Miller				Quality
The Mummification of the AFL-CIO
Climbing & Capitalism: The Death of Climbing Culture
Fewer libraries & more surveillance is a helluva sales pitch to potential students / families
There are Coney Islands everywhere in Michigan
Sometimes God, sometimes nothing					{ feuilleton }
Adversaria		Hope and Defeat: on John Berger on his centennial
Franz Wright's final poems
➥	Me the dumbfuck left the new book at home, the Franz Wright poem below is from *God's Silence
Starveling Rabblement - James Joyce: A Political Life
The Situation of Writing Itself					Six correlations
I was fifteen, the first sign my relationship w Jeannie R wasn't going to make it out of tenth grade is when she declared this her favorite song and played the 45 over and over
Fractal Meat On A Spongy Bone
Is ambient music evil?					Big Blood!

TO LARRY LEVIS

Franz Wright

Among the dead I cannot find you.
Let me rest here a minute
beneath these six leaves, crippled
tree slightly taller than I am
in a Manhattan sidewalk like a streetlamp
in a forest where I'm lost.

The Sane Unbenumbed Person Tongue-Tied, Sane with Gratitude and Terror

Old self-portrait, 2020, before the plague, from a time when canvases were tablets, reminded of it when struggling yesterday to keep my mouth shut and facial expression blank when a colleague at work expressed outrage at a video Trump released of Gaza as the Riviera of the Levant complete with shirtless Trump and Bibi on beach chairs drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas. Biden would never do this! he/she/they, outraged, barked, neglecting to cite the joe responsible for the destruction depicted at the beginning of the video, and it occurred to me that without these grids & hexjeffs my keeping my mouth shut and face straight an impossibility

The empire at its most honest
"Lawmakers in Alabama are expanding police immunity so that it's harder to sue cops for excessive force. The mask is off. Politicians want state-sanctioned violence to go unpunished. Everyone should be outraged about this. America is a fascist police state"
"Barack Obama signed $8.3 billion in cuts to SNAP. Dems didn't say a word. Joe Biden ended pandemic emergency measures resulting in 15 million Americans being thrown off Medicaid. Democrats silent. Again. The proposed cuts to SNAP and Medicaid by Republicans are draconian and inhumane. But if you're only speaking out when the GOP does it, and either ignore it or make excuses when Democrats do it, it's probably not Medicaid and SNAP you really care about"
Capital as Power in the 21st Century
"I Believe The World Is Ending - Does That Make Me Crazy?"
The Path to American Authoritarianism
"President of the United States posts video of him taking over Gaza with his statue for worship, dollars raining, Trump Gaza as centrepiece as he & Netanyahu chill at the beach. Ethnic cleansing rebranded as a real estate deal. Colonialist White Supremacist Zionism. Pure Evil"
⇧	"If you're old and slow like me, then that Trump Gaza video goes too quick to absorb its full insanity. So I took a few screenshots for you to digest at leisure. This is something genuinely posted by *the President of The United States Of America*.						⇧
The worldwide assault on working people
"Disgusting. I mean, the way a pile of pig offal or a bucket of chum or an overfull latrine is disgusting. The stench is permanent"
America First Deepens World Stagnation
⬇	"The Washington Post and LA Times editorial pages have gone full MAGA, MSNBC has purged all of its anti-Trump anchors, and Twitter is owned by a literal Nazi. Here's why liberal media bias is still a problem"						⬇
Bezos announces the Washington Post editorial page will exist solely to justify Bezos' shitlordly magnificence
⇧	"You might think Bezos is contradicting himself by declaring that all his minions must conform and support "personal liberties" on threat of expulsion. But for the US ruling classes, "liberty" has always meant "property", not "ideological freedom""						⇧
⇧	"Declaring that "personal liberties" are your north star in the same email where you're announcing that you're banning all views but your own from the newspaper is a helluva thing"						⇧
⇧	"Jeff, hi — now that the Washington Post oped page will become purely devoted to free markets, you should hire me to write about how Amazon's thousands of patents are a dangerous violation of free market principles"						⇧
"One reason (of many) that the very rich are "anti-government" is that they're not reliant on any govt services because they're rich. Courier services, private attorneys, private schools, cars and taxis, private playgrounds. In their minds "no one" uses public services, because no one they know does"
"Praise Jesus, we successfully voted to take food and healthcare from poor people to benefit the rich. Amen.”
"To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"This is not a political party right now. It is a country club for careerists who are happy to ride out the inferno in their luxury bunker"
Motherfucking Democrats hate you more than they hate magacrackers and it ain't even close
"We wanted to know how to make the Democratic party relevant again. So we talked to James Carville, Bill Maher, and Matt Yglesias"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
For shitlibs, it's not the genocide itself - who was the president that supplied the weapons and OKed the destruction depicted? Undersold, understated, denied genocide OK, tacky celebrated genocide icky. Shitlibs are shitty
(a) call them mercenaries and (b) the pigstool knows America has always employed mercenaries to do off-the-books wetwork so what he is calling for is on-the-books wetwork with all than implies both on-the-book and off in the future
"A major factor for why we are where we are is because for the last three decades, we’ve slopped up tons of movies and TV shows instilling the idea there are actually really cool billionaires and few if any about really cool forest rangers and VA staff"					Ubiquitous Evil
YES	Brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs
"the irony of receiving rape threats from zionists over an essay i wrote about zionists sexually assaulting people really does just speak for itself"
The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra)
The Supreme Court just gave scammers and robocallers the legal right to endlessly spam your phone and harass you
The decoupling of urban and rural America
"If we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists."
Maggie's		Today in Rhetorical Questions!
The Reliquary Translations (37, 38, 40, 43)
Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?
Things Brad Learned in the Fire: On the Destruction (and Rebirth) of a Bookstore
Elizabeth Bishop's grandparents					{ feuilleton }
There's a word for that			Percival Everett interview
Krasznahorkai interview					#1467 The long journey
Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate
Mark Ford on a new Anthony Hecht biography
NEW JENNY HVAL ALBUM IN MAY, NEW SONG NOW!
Autechre Announce North America and UK Tour					☞	They are playing Detroit the same week in October I'll be in Chelsea visiting my daughter and son-in-law, hmmm
NEW SWANS!					☞	Album out in May, no US tour dates as yet, new song	⬇

THE FACE

Franz Wright

Is there a single thing in nature

that can approach in mystery

the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   

its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   

by sights that ought to strike the sane   

unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   

with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   

at any given time: and if

you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   

they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you

with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile

the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   

preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   

one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   

or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,

to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake

Even if I agreed that if in fact Democrats work in the best faith they can given complete Shitlord control of all narratives why does that oblige me to support them, I said to a departing colleague who after years of me kablamming motherfucking Democrats still thinks I'm one with shitlibs. I genuinely like and will miss her, she's a terrier, a cat lady terrier hence our connection, terriers don't like most people, they're my favorite breed. I started that sentence last night and the gag appeared before I'd typed the second *terrier,* this getting old shit in every possible meaning. She didn't listen to what I said enough to answer my question; it was a nice summational goodbye. Here's one side of L's birthday present


An irony: I accuse Shitlords of planning for then executing deliberate chaos which is exactly how I paint, bad hand skills so chaos with intent. How many people have you worked with, lived with, been forced to love, who create crises constantly as a means of power and control, who with glee chronically make everything edgy and complicated and competitive and ultimately and inevitably terminally fucked up? I'm saying I understand their strategy in the mediums they use, though I like my end result better than shitlords', ymmv. Here's the other side of L's birthday present



We're one fucked up animal. A week from when I type this sentence Donald Trump will have been president six and a half hours. Biden had two months to try and secure and tighten some of the programs and policies they told us Trump will kill and Biden pardoned a judge who sold kids into for-profit prisons and the Biden bragged about being a great-grandfather when asked about the LA fires. He gave Liz Cheney one kind of fake medal and Bono a more prestigious fake medal. In an exit interview he asserted that he would have beat Trump but stepped aside to save party unity which regarding him is a lie but is ironically delicious as that is the heartbeat of professional Democrat omerta: party before country. This motherfucking vain motherfucking banal evil piece of shit motherfucker. I did not say this to my departing friend, if she knows about this blog (Hi Sam) she'd the first in library that I know of who knows about this blog since the exodus of the few who know (or more likely knew and forgot - when you walk out of the building the last time it's like you never worked here, never existed and still don't, and visa versa you who stayed to the departed, poof) just before, during, and after the plague.





Morton Feldman's 99th birthday was Sunday past, same as L's, why did I never think of his music as eligible for My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game when I was obsessed with My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, I've always listened to it as much as the two permanent members and certainly listen to it more now since I (love listening to Feldman when making chaos and trying to control it) rarely listen to the two permanent members and then only when it comes into my ears without my making the selection and my best guess viz Feldman and My Sillyass Deserted Island Five game is I can't air guitar Feldman which suggests deeply horrible things about me but an absolutely true reason is it's too large and quiet to listen to in a car because of road noise. I no longer tend any of my deserted island five games. Fine metaphors abound

Crime of the Century: CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide
☝	"Gaza Ceasefire Proves Biden Wanted Genocide"						☝
Police ignore standards after facial recognition matches						➡	Which is, after all, the intent
American nutshell				Trump Changes Nothing
The nihilism of Antony Blinken
"so many bloviating free-speech warriors in this country, so much cowardly silence over the worst cancel culture/ repression of free speech in my lifetime"
"These are our heroes? These are our role models?"
"If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?						➡	No
Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble
Oligarch farmers and the fires in Los Angeles
The pistachio billionaires who guzzle more water than all of fire-ravaged Los Angeles
Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash”
"The unilateral moment has ended. Russia, India and China have become too rich and too powerful to be looted. U.S. vassals are now by far the easier target"
"When the empire gets bratty, the vassals get trampled"
Both my parents were public school teachers, my aunts and uncles were public school teachers, my wife and daughter are public school teachers, did you hear ONE FUCKING DEMOCRAT SAY ONE FUCKING WORK ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION AND ITS COMING COMPLETE GUTTING in run-up to election? Today In Rhetorical Questions
☝	Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools						☝
SMUG PARTY		➡	"Harris ran the campaign that party leaders wanted. It flattered moderate pundits and centrist online commentators, aimed at conservatives and took left support for granted. After this strategy cost them another winnable election, Democrats are faced with a familiar simple question: Should we try to figure out what went wrong, change things and face the next election cycle with an invigorated party? Or should we stay the course, blame benighted voters and take perverse joy in their misery? No prize for guessing the answer"
From Gaza to California: the flames that connect us all
"So the State Dept narrative managers at 60 Minutes held this footage for 8 months, publishing it just hours before the end of the Biden era, to ensure no massacres were interfered with and no US officials felt the heat"
The mysterious ways of Donald J. Trump
"The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system"
Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
"It will be months before a complete voter file is available to offer a full and detailed picture of what went wrong, but what is clear from exit polls and county-level data is that, in 2024, Democrats lost ground everywhere. Their support eroded even in the party’s ­typical strongholds — urban centers, college towns, and majority-Black counties — an indication that the party fundamentally failed to understand its own base’s chief concerns, to say nothing of the broader electorate. The party failed to offer solutions or ­communicate the solutions it was offering; relied on data to guide advertising choices, muddling the narrative; and aligned itself with unpersuasive surrogates. Democrats forgot, essentially, how to talk to American voters — while failing, comically at times, to reach potentially persuadable voters who were actively tuned out from politics"
Maggie's		Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
"All appeals to cultural purity and tradition have to be regarded with suspicion, whether from the left or the right, politically"
Big Other Anthology 2024
The Hypnotic Churr of the Nightjar
An Uncomfortable Moment at the Thirteenth Annual Delmore Schwartz Memorial Picnic					{ feuilleton }
"and practice is a regular highlight of my week. i get to see my bros and make stuff with them. music is about communication, it is inherently prosocial. all the good things about music and making music aren’t monetizable which is why these assholes have these dry joyless opinions"
Alexis Wright			Midafternoon thoughts
myself (not me, I promise), w Alice Notley poem
One year from two days ago will be Morton Feldman's centenary

 
BLADE

Franz Wright

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake