New self-portrait, first in a year, ink, pencil, watercolor, salt
It's not done, still working on the words that go inside, what order they will go in and in what medium
Chances are good I'll fuck it up so I timestamp here a thing I made that I like just after I made it before I fuck it up
I forget how much I love this then remember why I stop, I have modest talent in design and color but limited hand skills and have no delusional ambitions (for these or those poems I write) beyond making, especially with good music in my Dr Sevrin ears (update)
Abortion was for the mouth-breathers, gutting the EPA for the shitlords
Yes, he signaled he'd set aside the filibuster against his will of course and hours after announcement that Leahy will be out months with a broken hip and Biden has his manchin so this is nothing but posturing and will never happen
Laugh, it is not by design but certainly not a coincidence my favorite posts often birth themselves for a Friday post before a three-day holiday weekend
I increased the font size on my laptop* (and dimmed the lights) because side effect number two of working from home, my eyes
I have not changed the seethings on this bleg though it occurs to me I change sentences to fit the square of blaager's current seethings which I now can't if I don't turn the current seethings into obsolete seethings and no, me dumb setting motherfucker, I call this clusterfuck not fake but the best fake farted, yes? anything that happens now nuke Tehran or lay siege to Grand Rapids I have been always was will always be not a wrong barometer
(*that won't turn off until it shuts itself off when I don't want it to then won't turn back on when I want it to)
Working, the bigger font, the dimmer light
Someone in his later years spends cold rainy nights inside more and more
Egoslavian High Bleggalgazing Day still three days away, but Memorial Day Weekend marks the start of the Blog Days of Summer.
So, a post on the slowest day of the second slowest weekend of the year in Blegsylvania.
I directly addressed a bleggal-twaater overlord yesterday instead of averting my eyes, forgive me, I got the non-response I expected though the bleggal-twaater's use of the link I sent, unattributed, fifteen minutes later? I wish that surprised me.
So, reminder: if you are Kinding me and me not you, please let me know.
If there's someone you think I should be reading, please let me know.
Blessed Serendipity: Magnetic Fields/all Stephin Merritt projects are both Earthgirl's and Planet's favorite bar none. Planet graduates college on May 16 in Just North of Appalachia in
Northeast Mid-Central Ohio. I just bought her a graduation present,
tickets for Merritt in Columbus the evening she graduates:
Stephin Merritt will embark on a rare solo tour of the U.S.A. starting
May 2nd, 2015, accompanied by long-time bandmate Sam Davol on cello. The
duo will play 14 dates across the country, including two dates in Los
Angeles and shows in Washington, D.C.; Austin; San Francisco and more.
Visit the calendar for the tour itinerary and ticket information. For
this series of intimate performances, Merritt will present a set of
solo, acoustic versions of selected songs from his wide ranging catalog.
As a framework, Merritt plans to perform 26 of his songs in
alphabetical order. Will he begin with "Absolutely Cuckoo" or "A Chicken
With Its Head Cut Off," or...? Will he end with "Zebra" or "Zombie
Boy," or...? You'll find out!
Wasn't
sure if anyone else who might be joining us or not, so four tickets. Earthgirl
and I are also going to see this in DC on May 3, tickets on sale Friday,
I'm to buy four, one for Hamster and one for - I'm not going to lie to
you, Brother - the woman Earthgirl wants to set him up with. Earthgirl
will claim that the woman GENUINELY loves Magnetic Fields so while this
IS technically a set-up the audacity of the set-up is mitigated by the
woman's genuine love of Magnetic Fields. She believes this, I'm not going to argue. It's an early May Sunday, Brother, surely you've a ticket to something already that night. If not, find something. Or join us.
I'm hoping this will be the I song at one of the shows:
Do I want to see The Replacements? No. No, I don't think I do. This reeks of sad.
Yes, I know, yesterday was Jack Gilbert's birthday. Gilbert and Ammons, born on the same day one year apart. Click tag for more Gilbert poems.
HARD WIRED Jack Gilbert
He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing inside him is like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.
RELATIVE PITCH
Jack Gilbert
I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.
TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT
Jack Gilbert
There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.
A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE
Jack Gilbert
The Poles rode out from Warwaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not MacBeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. and the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
RPM of the above post mentioned Jack Gilbert in a tweet yesterday, here, Jack Gilbert poems.
UPDATE:
POEM AT THE NEW YEAR
John Ashbery
Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,
that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other
principles prevail in this glum haven, don’t they? If that’s what it is.
Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the drop was
on the burr I know not. I come all
packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things,
I wonder about Australia. Is it anything like Canada?
Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete
the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system?
Can we trust others to indict us
who see us only in the evening rush hour
and never stop to think? O I was so bright about you,
my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.
The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.
At least that’s how it feels to me.
I know it as well as all the streets in the map of my imagined
industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past.
There was never any fullness that was going to be;
you stood in line for things, and the soiled light was
impenitent. Spiky was one adjective that came to mind,
yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.
Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke
in cafés and outside the great ashen bird
streamed from lettered display-windows, and waited
a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.
Strangest days of my life: suddenly, I can read non-fiction but not fiction - what the fuck is happening to me:
The form that innovation takes within capitalism is as the continual simulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same. For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike, the present. Within the framework of a mid-twentieth-century futurism, the products one purchased and fit into one's life seemed vaguely linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on. There was at least the misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.
Jack Gilbert, reading. Click the Gilbert tag for Gilbert poems. I'd post a Gilbert poem today but I want to post the Simic below, found in NYRB today, which may or not be a poem though I chose to say it is.
My motherfucking free blogging platform is motherfucking skeevy this morning. I mean, compared to its normal motherfucking skeeviness.
Oh, and Death Metal, my addiction is deepening. Strangest days of my life.
PORTABLE HELL
Charles Simic
The world is going to hell in a hurry. At my age, I ought to be used to it, but I’m not.
Perhaps ignorance is bliss, I say to myself, and think of
people I know who care little about what goes on in the world. I have
sympathy for them. It’s no fun starting one’s day or retiring at night
with images of dead children.
When he was old, my father said that he could think of two ways to
break his addiction to newspapers: enter a monastery or a lunatic
asylum.
Today’s news is always old news. The innocent get slaughtered and someone makes up excuses.
The same type of lunatics who made the world what it was when I was a
child are still around. Their names have changed, their nationalities
and causes, too, but they are as demented and as bloodthirsty as they
ever were.
To hear our conservatives talk, our problems are only moral ones: the
laziness of our poor and the insatiable sexual appetite of our women
being on the top of the list. Yes, of course, but it’s more than that.
They just can’t close their legs.
We should demand that the servants of the rich and powerful in every
walk of life wear livery appropriate to their rank, as they did in the
past centuries.
I caught myself scratching my head with a match as if trying to set it on fire.
They got up and applauded the rich guy for bankrupting companies and
laying off employees and crowded afterward to get his autograph.
Eighty thousand people held in solitary in our prisons. Think about
that as you plump your pillow and make yourself comfy in your bed some
night.
Has any country ever admitted killing civilians out of a desire for
revenge? Like everyone else in occupied Europe, I hated Germans and
wished them all dead. However, later on, when I saw the extent of
destruction the Allied bombing had done to their cities, I was horrified
by what was obviously pure malice.
Collective punishment, in which the entire population of the enemy
country is targeted, so that an old man in a wheelchair and a kid
reading a book in bed are in as much danger as a tank, is a vile
impulse, and though it is now regarded as a violation of the laws of war
and the Geneva Conventions, it has continued to be practiced long after
Dresden and Hiroshima.
Taking into account unintended consequences is not regarded as a
necessary component of strategic thinking in Washington. No wonder our
grand project to remake the world in our own image, shape the future,
and determine the outcome of history has proved to be as much of a flop
as the world revolution the old commies were preaching.
“Collateral damage” is what somebody’s grandparents with their heads blown off are called today.
Of course, this is not generally how we talk about things. We
practice what Ted Snider in a recent blog post called “a doctrine of
historical creationism,” an interpretation of current events that is
manipulated by selecting a convenient starting point for them—one that
leaves out prior events and the larger setting in which they are
unfolding.
There’s an authoritarian strain to this need to restrict historical
precedent and turn serious issues into comic book narratives. We
encounter it both in political commentary on Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, and
Iran and in the way domestic issues are discussed. For people with long
memories, this is not just infuriating but also terrifying.
This is a just war; we ought to remind the population of the next
country we invade. People killed by our bombs can regard themselves as
extremely lucky.
Portable hell, the kind that can fit comfortably inside your head,
despite the vast crowds of the damned and all that fire and smoke, is
what you end up with after reading the world news these days.
It’s strange that reporters continue to ask our elected
representatives for their opinions, as if the rich who contributed
millions to their campaigns would allow them to have any of their own.
A society like ours in which the wealthy are spending millions to
prevent the minimum wage from being raised for those sinking deeper and
deeper into poverty, and to sabotage health insurance coverage for those
who have none, is not a society at all but a state of war, as Mark
Twain would have said.
Who would have thought that people with a thorough knowledge of
history and science would become pariahs among their fellow citizens?
It’s been a while since I last read anyone, aside from palpable
hucksters, make an argument that the world is getting to be a better
place, or that we are about to turn a new leaf in this country.
“Privatization” is what the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few is called.
I forget: Who said, “He lives most gaily who knows how to deceive himself”?
The gourmet recipe in the dining section of the Times was Fisherman’s Beef Stew—or did I get that wrong?
A man changed himself back into a monkey through an operation and
returned to live in the trees happily ever after, I once read in a
tabloid waiting in line at the supermarket. I’m thinking that may not
really be so bad.
May these beautiful summer days that remain pass with as little hurry as a pregnant nun going to confession.
I bought tickets months ago to see Bonnie Prince Billy at Rams Head in Annapolis next Thursday November 21, 2013. Unfortunately, Earthgirl has since been roped into an evening work function that night so we can't go. Anyone want the tickets? You can have them, not trying to recoup the money, just would be a shame for them to go to waste. I have them and can scan them into PDF and email them to you. Let me know.
Fortunately, Bonnie Prince Billy is playing the next night, Friday the 22nd, in a building less than 200 yards from where I type this sentence, going with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Xtina. The woman at the box office also said Oldham is buds with a faculty member in the Music dept and will be giving free workshops on song-writing on campus open to all GU people, and like, holyfuck!
TEAR IT DOWN
Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by
dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning
that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By
insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into
love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back
toward childhood will not help. The village is not better than Pittsburgh. Only
Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh. Rome is better than Rome in the same way
the sound of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls of the garbage tub is more
than the stir of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not enough. We die
and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time.
We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach
the body within the body.
Jack Gilbert died a year ago today. If I played a Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets, etc... Here's last year's post and all the poems that were posted in the following days:
Jack Gilbert has died. I posted four of his poems two days ago here. Below are four more. Here is an article on Gilbert posted just yesterday. Here is a profile. Here is a review of Gilbert's Collected Poems from earlier this year: make it your Giftmas present to yourself. Here's Harriet. Here is the Paris Review interview. If you type Jack Gilbert into the search box top left many more of his poems will appear. UPDATE: three more poems for Wednesday here.
HARD WIRED
Jack Gilbert
He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing inside him is like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.
RELATIVE PITCH
Jack Gilbert
I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.
TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT
Jack Gilbert
There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.
A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE
Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE
Jack Gilbert
The Poles rode out from Warwaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not MacBeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. and the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
They suck, I said to A and her partner E at a special Saturday Night BBQ edition of Thursday Night Pints at K's place when A asked me how United was doing this year. They're playing and losing right now, I said. A taught my favorite grad class, Performance and Ethics (what does it mean, for instance, to act counter to beliefs to keep a job?), she left Hilltop years ago - left teaching years ago - to run a theater in San Francisco, was in town for the first time in three years. Even if United didn't suck, I told her, I'd have come to the party. Lots of talk of Hilltop of course, none of which will be revealed here. Political talk, of course, it wasn't surprising that consensus within gradations of nuance was expressed. E told us about her work for __________________ and against
________________, asked me to write it just like that. Taunt the fucking
bots, she said. I said, I only get scrubbed now and then, and she said,
have you got a lot of hits out of Utah lately, and I said, yes, just in
the past six months or so, and she smiled.
UPDATE! Sorry, meant to tease: punch line tomorrow.
Yes, I've posted the Gilbert poem below many times. I like it.
Your David Thomas Song of the Day:
FAILING AND FLYING
Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
OK, I admit I'd never heard that song until yesterday on Irwin's show, what, it was wowee, I wasn't going to post it? I swear, blessed serendipity, I woke up this morning with the song below the Jack Gilbert poem in my head and then when link-fishing this morning I saw this, posted while I was asleep. Holyfucking weird. As for the Gilbert poem, I was surprised when I saw this obit/appreciation of Gilbert last night and realized I hadn't posted it during the Gilbert blizzard:
TRANSGRESSIONS
He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in just being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often while no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving it all alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting the neighbors' wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pinewoods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.
On the suckage of presidents. I don't know what Spielberg's motives were when he made Lincoln, though the combination of his full-throated support of Obama and my wild and profound distrust of Obama lead me to think Spielberg's making a comparison between Lincoln and Obama re: the noble sacrifices and hard choices each made and make in the face of racist opposition by enemies and rank political opportunism by friends. Forgive me if I can't equate ordering the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans for the emancipation of slaves with the impoverishing of millions for the saving of bankers' summer cottages in the Alps.
Plus, as the great (I think so, the guy at the link above thinks so) Duane Ellison ( I took this guy's class years ago. I can tell you that this is
hands-down the WORST teacher I have EVER had - so bad I never forgot his
name. Rude and just plain creepy as all get out. Impossible tests. Over
half the class dropped out before the semester ended. This man made me
hate history. DO NOT take his class - you have been warned) taught, the Civil War was about (1) National Bank (2) sale and distribution of western lands (3) protective tariffs and (4) internal capital improvements and only became about slavery when the Union citizens collectively gave up the fuck about the top four.
Even if United was hosting the MLS Cup title game this Saturday and I was there and would scream for a victory I would still shout that MLS playoffs suck. Cause they do.
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.
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.
