Whelp, I seem to still be here and own my own name
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Ten years ago I would have fretted until confirmed and while I haven't achieved full Fuck-it I am fuckmiles closer now than ever before. Below taken during a root canal in 2016 halfway between full Fuck-it and where Fuck-it plus or minus is now
More signs of the apocalypse - the Grateful Dead are one of this year's Kennedy Center Honorees, so fuck me, and if you think don't think Kamala Harris will adopt and continue to prosecute Joe's genocide - have you been watching the savagery of the neverending Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft behind the fog of Joe's disintegration on live TV, 24-7 coverage, this year's hit tv show - you're a dope, but at least you're not taping a menstrual pad to your ear to support King Cracker, this is the communicative principle, yes? Here's a secret video of the Democrat Party's brain trust directing the flock on offing Joe and what to say after Joe offed
Today's bleggalgaze: the guy above, fifteen years ago I was in a group blog with him and others, I would have been fretting the renewal of domain name then, now I can't even remember the blog's name beyond part of it was Area 51. I think
"Where to go is difficult. If you speak Mandarin and they’ll let you in, China’s not a bad choice. Avoid the UK unless you have no other options: Britain is in terminal decline. In general Europe is in decline and the chance of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) stopping makes it questionable for those who are younger or who have children, but while Europe is going down, the welfare state still exists and will take longer to go away, so long as you choose your destination carefully"
DNC’s Plan to Force Biden’s Nomination Is Everything People Hate About the DNC
"The DNC chairman was a lobbyist for Bank of America, BP, Google, Boeing and Big Pharma…and yet some people are suddenly shocked that he’s lying and trying to rig a democratic process, I mean please"
"It will never stop being funny that elected Democratic Congress members and senators are openly telling reporters they’ve just accepted that Biden is losing and when random dipshits like me on Twitter also do this somehow the collapse of democracy is my fault instead"
"Don't let this sad coda to his long career be his only legacy! I prefer to remember him as he was in his prime: a bagman for corporate lords, architect of the racist Crime Bill and the family-crushing Bankruptcy Bill and ardent champion of mass murder in Iraq"
The media are doing this meme again for the Trump shooter lol
"Every new totalitarian system is preceded by some sort of civil war. You can’t just implement totalitarianism out of nowhere. In order to impose totalitarianism on society, you need to tear society apart, pit the masses against each other, foment fanaticism, mass hysteria, and hatred. Above all you need to foment fear. Once you have torn society apart and whipped the masses into a mindless paroxysm of fear and hate and murderous rage, you can implement your new form of totalitarianism fairly easily, as people will be desperate for the restoration of “order.”
It is impossible to overstate what pussies crackerwhisperers think crackers are (and are not wrong)
One of my Hillaryite Colleagues watched the first two nights of the GOP Convention then found me the morning after to demand my outrage match HC's re: rightwinger tribalism. I'm not watching it, I said, and I suggest you not either unless you need feed your hate. They're fucking nuts, HC said this morning. What would you have me say, I said, and continued, then stopped. Motherfucking Knausgaard, I said. What, HC said. I've the perfect photo for this post, I said, Olive's head backlit by my bed's lamp so that her face is in shadows and her head's silhouette's blackened against the bright-lit lampshade, but there's a fucking copy of fucking Knausgaard's first fucking book in his fucking struggle series on top of a book pile next to the lamp that Earthgirl put there when she was cleaning out her car and found the books she bought for me at her school's annual booksale a few months back, she says she remembered me and Hamster talking about Knausgaard at dinner or something and thoughtfully bought me a copy thinking I'd be interested. Dear reader of this post - I'm talking to you now - the above photo is not advocacy of a book I tried at least a half dozen times on the recommendation and urging of folk whose opinions I value - it sucks, sucks like a fucking Bob Dylan song sucks. And then there's the plagiarism, HC said. Brilliant move on Trump's part, I said, keeps the Media focus off the rightwing tribalists' calling for Hillary's heart be cut from her chest and shown beating to her before she dies. Fuck you, HC said.
Pop song?
LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE
Albert Goldbarth
The renewal project is doomed: because
its funding board’s vice-president resigned: because
the acids of divorce were eating day-long
at her stomach, at her thoughts: because
her husband was neglecting her, in favor of his daughter,
who was dying: because her husband,
bi and edgy, bore an AIDS sore that was ripe
enough with fear and woe to throw this whole
thick network of connections off its balance
and down a hole of human misery. Haven’t we seen it happen?
—when a crowded room at a party was tilted
perilously askew by the weight of two
wept tears that weren’t as large as a housefly’s wings,
that couldn’t have filled a pistachio shell.
_________
It’s like this: because because because,
Sawyer was drunk when he delivered his opening remarks
onstage at Stardome Planetarium. He
stood below a slide show of “The Emptiness of Outer Space”
—stars and planets, scattered like the scantest
motes of dust in unimaginable void—and was about
to make the leap to what percent of us,
our dearly thumping bodies, is a corresponding emptiness . . .
when one foot met a wire that had strayed
outside the curtain, and a wild arc of hand undid
the podium, which canted off its casters sidelong
into the 3-D galaxy props, and you could say whatever
thimble or pustule or hackle of grief was his,
it had toppled the whole damn universe.
_________
Was she a ghost? Sometimes she thought she was
a ghost, transparent, stealing through the lives of people
untouched and untouching. And so she carried a bucket
of burning coals (we’ll call it that for now) against
her breasts; and then she knew she was alive. And
he. . . ?—was just the rusty foxing that an antique book
exhales into dim air, wasn’t that what he was,
oh it was, yes it was, and so one afternoon he strapped
a meteorite to his back, and now he walks the streets
like anybody else. An ageless tribal saying:
If you aren’t given a burden, you must carve own.
An eye will do, if it’s ill. One word, if it’s cruel.
And don’t be fooled by breath: the throat holds up
some old-time blues the way a hod holds bricks.
_________
But she didn’t die of full-blown AIDS
—Sawyer’s daughter. Even so, her twisted legs and limp
are enough to sometimes send him a little
over the blotto line. Tonight, though, after show time,
he’s just soused enough to wander through the mock-up
stage-set milky ways agog with child-wonder:
all those luminescent islands! all that vacuum!
Look: a planet floats, there’s that much cosmos
all around it. A planet! While we . . . we couldn’t
squint and levitate a half inch, not the guru-most
among us. Well, we could: if the laws of the universe changed.
It's the year's Holiest Day in America! Rex Ryan will hit you in the balls with a penalty flag for not eating your pizza crust. Fuck fucking helmetball and fuck fucking celebrations of commercials for crap. It's also Blogroll Amnesty Day. Nobody remembers. (UPDATE!People remember!) No one has ever proposed a Twitter Follower Amnesty Day, there's a long-form here, a comprehensive Blegsylvanian history to be written, fuck that. Still, be Kind to your fellow motherfuckers, please. As always, if you are Kinding me and me not you please let me know.
Two more Egoslavian Bleggalgazing Anthems for Blogroll Amnesty Day:
"WHILE MONITORING THE SKY FOR AIRSPACE VIOLATIONS, INDIA'S ARMY REPORTEDLY MISTOOK JUPITER AND VENUS FOR CHINESE SPY DRONES" —Time
Albert Goldbarth
I'm sorry. I mistook your weather balloon
for a "saucer" sent to Earth through interstellar space,
and now that it's crashed in a desert waste
I like to think of as Smithereens, New Mexico, I can tell
by the scattered fragments that, if reassembled
and set afloat, a weather balloon is what they'd be
to sane, objective eyes. And please accept
my apologies: I thought your lover was
my lover, and any unfortunate sets of intertanglement
that took place every Thursday night last spring
had more to do with a similarity of colognes
and cheap endearments than with anything
of substance; plus the light at that motel,
as you know, is so dim. Let me grovel right now:
I mistook your far-off country for a real country,
that matters—although I'm sure your little festivals
and exports have their charm. I beg your pardon,
your butt is not a political party. How right
you are in that! Mea culpa, in grabbing your breast
I believed I was climbing Mr. Everest. I thought that explained
the flags and the photographers. Forgive me,
it was the cherished hope of your entire life, and not
a fly that I swatted. But—there it was! Oh let me issue
a formal retraction, cells of my body:
you don't have immortality written
into your very nuclei, although you'll never believe that.
And it wasn't "moonlight," there's no such thing,
there's only the light of the sun relayed as a rumor.
And it wasn't particles, it was waves.
(It wasn't waves, it was particles.)
And I'm sorry, but ... I'm just not sorry, I did
my best, I tried my hardest, some days simply
getting out of bed in the morning was heroism
in action, and if there are nights when I think the other planets
are really things of Earth, I mean it
as a tribute to the fullness of the universe
that's "this" but at the same time "that,"
and is always the one and only truth,
and the one and only opposite truth.
Remember that? It's been years. I used it back during POTUS 08 when I was soddenly impressed with Obama the Gameplayer. What a dope. I was accosted this morning by an obamaphile, she's MWAR!! about tonight's SOTU, MWAR!! about Obama's recent Cuomo-conversion, she's MWAR!! about motherfucking POTUS 16 even if it's Hillary (she thinks Elizabeth Warren will be nominee). Am I going to watch the SOTU tonight? she gushingly asked. Did I say, Funny how he didn't give this progressive-rallying speech in 2010 or 2012 or 2014, that he waits until both he and his party are at their nadir of power, that of all the cynical speeches Obama has given this speech - if it is his Cuomo keynote - will be the most cynical? No. Even if I am not that dope now that I was in 2008 the dope I am now remembers that dope I was then. Even if I am not the dope now that I was three, four years ago when apostatic spasms spewed the words I did not bark today I remember the dope I was then. The dope I am in six years - the dope I am tomorrow - will remember the dope I am now who can't restrain himself this post.
I couldn't resist tweeting out the above snark. I am small.
And yes, while I've a myth that I am successfully running from I've yet to create a myth of what I am running towards.
The American justice system is not broken. I tweeted this last night: Lordy, the point of all this is too kick the give-a-shit out of you
ahead of *their* not giving a shit about you with more baton than now.
Ladies and Gentleman, Rand Paul explains the causes of Eric Garner's death: Well you know I think it’s hard not to watch that video of him saying ‘I
can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ and not be horrified by it. But I think
there’s something bigger than the individual circumstances. Obviously,
the individual circumstances are important. But I think it is also
important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of
cigarettes so that driven cigarettes underground by making them so
expensive. But then some politician also had to direct the police to
say, ‘hey we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette.’
And for someone to die over breaking that law, there really is no excuse
for it. But I do blame the politicians. We put our police in a
difficult situation with bad laws.
An exhaustive list of elected Democrats calling out Rand Paul for his comments on Eric Garner's death:
So, loving the Agota Kristof trilogy, staying up through the night and eating 500 pages for the first time in what might have been a decade, naturally threw me into a ficition-reading slump. Trying something new: when reading in bed I am reading Krasznahorkai's Satantango, when I'm in the living room I am reading Helen DeWitt's Lightening Rods, when I'm at my desk at work I am reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, when I'm in the staff lounge or reading on the 5th floor I'm rereading Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. Working so far. Especially Ishiguro. Of course.
Oh man, I love love love, MSADI5G-love, Fucked Up:
SENTIMENTAL
Albert Goldbarth
The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be
condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages
of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple
in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July
in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air
like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.
Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues
to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling
out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run
for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues
like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this
slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does
“earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes
in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,
yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What
if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,
hammering winter? When my father was buried,
the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said
that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do
to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play
the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that
lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs
we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning
of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . .
Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths
of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke
as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened,
mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers
sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But
they have their validity, don't they, yes? their
sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting
in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time
alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . .
questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face
of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out
the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,
and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics.
What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde
gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm
to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue
quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if
I wept? What if I simply put the page down,
rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot
the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into
the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising
light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,
just that, no drama, and it was so cold,
and the air was so brittle, metal buckled
out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,
where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry
all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s
Pat Paulsen was born 87 years ago today. The first time I was aware
of POTUS and elections was watching his campaign on The Smothers
Brothers Show in 1968. I'd vote for his corpse today.
Irony and Radicalism: But a funny thing happened to the radicals of the twentieth century: they began to combine their leftism with irony... In the West, by the fifties, no radical intellectual would think of making bombastic pledges about engineering the future without hedging them closely about with irony.
Not doing is doing too: By not voting it would remove the legitimacy that the federal government hide behind. If everyone refused to vote it would shake the whole systyem to its rotten and putrid foundations.
Communism is alive and kicking? Communism as political possibility and communism as philosophical
concept mutually reinforce each other. Without the active movements in
opposition to austerity, cuts, debt, and inequality, the theoretical
discussions would have failed to resonate. They would have remained
stuck in libraries and lecture halls, dusty remnants of past struggles
rendered objects of scholarly reflection. Likewise, without the
conceptual reemergence of communism as an idea, the movements of 2011
would not have appeared as a common struggle. The connections between
education struggles in England, austerity struggles in Greece and Spain,
and anti-foreclosure struggles in the U.S. would not have jumped from
their local contexts and become legible as moments in the same struggle,
a struggle against capitalism. (h/t)
I know I said there would be Kate Bush songs this weekend, but no, apparently there won't be, I spent last night with Swans, woke up with Swans in my head.
To Be Kind is one of a dozen of my favorite album of 2014 so far.
SENTIMENTAL
Albert Goldbarth
The light has traveled unthinkable thousands of miles to be
condensed, recharged, and poured off the white white pages
of an open Bible the country parson holds in front of this couple
in a field, in July, in the sap and the flyswirl of July
in upper Wisconsin, where their vows buzz in a ring in the air
like the flies, and are as sweet as the sap, in these rich and ritual minutes.
Is it sentimental? Oops. And out of that Bible the light continues
to rush as if from a faucet. There will be a piecrust cooling
out of its own few x’ed-out cuts. And will it make us run
for the picklier taste of irony rolled around protectively on our tongues
like a grab of Greek olives? My students and I discuss this
slippery phenomenon. Does “context” matter? Does
“earned” count? If a balled-up fidget of snakes
in the underbrush dies in a freeze is it sentimental? No,
yes, maybe. What if a litter of cocker spaniels? What
if we called them “puppydogs” in the same poem in that same hard,
hammering winter? When my father was buried,
the gray snow in the cemetery was sheet tin. If I said
that? Yes, no, what does “tone” or “history” do
to the Hollywood hack violinists who patiently wait to play
the taut nerves of the closest human body until from that
lush cue alone, the eyes swell moistly, and the griefs
we warehouse daily take advantage of this thinning
of our systems, then the first sloppy gushes begin . . .
Is that “wrong”? Did I tell you the breaths
of the gravediggers puffed out like factorysmoke
as they bent and straightened, bent and straightened,
mechanically? Are wise old (toothless) Black blues singers
sentimental?—“gran’ma”? “country cookin’”? But
they have their validity, don't they, yes? their
sweat-in-the-creases, picking up the lighting
in a fine-lined mesh of what it means to have gone through time
alive a little bit on this planet. Hands shoot up . . . opinions . . .
questions . . . What if the sun wept? the moon? Why, in the face
of those open faces, are we so squeamish? Call out
the crippled girl and her only friend the up-for-sale foal,
and let her tootle her woeful pennywhistle musics.
What if some chichi streetwise junkass from the demimonde
gave forth with the story of orphans forced through howling storm
to the workhouse, letting it swing between the icy-blue
quotation marks of cynicism—then? What if
I wept? What if I simply put the page down,
rocked my head in my own folded elbows, forgot
the rest of it all, and wept? What if I stepped into
the light of that page, a burnished and uncompromising
light, and walked back up to his stone a final time,
just that, no drama, and it was so cold,
and the air was so brittle, metal buckled
out song like a bandsaw, and there, from inside me,
where they’d been lost in shame and sophistry
all these years now, every last one of my childhood’s
Serendipitously, news of David Letterman's retirement announcement coincides with an urge to bleggalgaze, gives me opportunity to satisfy the second with the above, this blog's Theme Song Seven.
The Pointlessness of Unplugging: Unplugging seems motivated by two contradictory concerns: efficiency and
enlightenment. Those who seek efficiency rarely want to change their
lives, only to live more productively; rather than eliminating
technology, they seek to regulate their use of it through
Internet-blocking programs like Freedom and Anti-Social, or through
settings like Do Not Disturb. The hours that they spend off the Internet
aren’t about purifying the soul but about streamlining the mind. The
enlightenment crowd, by contrast, abstains from technology in search of
authenticity, forsaking e-mail for handwritten letters, replacing phone
calls with face-to-face conversations, cherishing moments instead of
capturing them with cameras. Both crowds are drawn to events like the
Day of Unplugging, and some members even pay premiums to vacation at
black-hole resorts that block the Internet and attend retro retreats
that ban electronics. Many become evangelists of such technological
abstinence, taking to social media and television, ironically, to share
insights from their time in the land of innocence.
Not only do I not daydream any longer of detaching my cords, I no longer daydream I ever daydreamed of detaching my cords.
Talking with Albert Goldbarth. For a bunch of his poems click the tag in footer.
Anemmeffingobjectsubjectobjectpoem. And thanks for feedback, and yes, last today's might not be yesterday and tomorrow's today though I do seem to abandon them after a bit.
SESTINA: AS THERE ARE SUPPORT GROUPS, THERE ARE SUPPORT WORDS
Albert Goldbarth
The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.”
—Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer
When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,
one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!
Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair
sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”
into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation
is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,
whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron
favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,
evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer
at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor
and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.
Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation
from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation
difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’
today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share
of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer
and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-
eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen
hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen
sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,
both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n
Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer
black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer
in the first set and then, for a twofer,
(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far
out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen
in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,
mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn
my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-
tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,
Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer
man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear
this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-
Remember to give to WFMU during their marathon, widget over in left column. Do it for me.
I'm reminded that during Big News Spasms - Ukraine in this instance - Blegsylvania, at least my Stringtown in Blegsylvania, slows up. It no longer surprises me - people go to their usual and favorite big sources to keep up with latest news/assimilate their tribe's common wisdom on the event.
How the internet is narrowing our minds: As our options have grown, so has the overwhelming dominance of a
generic set of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Mainstream culture, aided
and abetted (or thwarted and warped) by the frenetic pace of the
Internet, has fallen into a punishing pattern: a few books—the ones that
win prizes, are heavily promoted, or feature at least one vampire—rake
in all the media attention and readers. All others are flops. In the
book economy, the middle class is dying. The idea of an eHarmony for
books is similarly a way of narrowing choices in the face of an
overwhelming field of options. Paradoxically, because personalization
relies on shared categories, its results can flatten the real
differences between individuals.
UPDATE! Yes yes yes, I know it's Mark E Smith's birthday today, a The Fall cascade is already in the can, will be posted later this afternoon.
DOOZEY
Albert Goldbarth
"A bun in her oven? Geez Louise, isn't that
malarkey? Estelle? Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?"
"I thought it was bunkum too,
when I heard it. Really: you coulda knocked me
for a loop. But Alice told me, and she's jake."
Alice: the provenance, the gatekeeper. So it wasn't all hooey.
It was the real goods. Aunt Ruby
hadn't shown up for her visit last month and,
well, Estelle was in a pickle, was between the proverbial
rock and its cousin the hard place, friendless,
paddleless up that famous defecatory creek and down
in the dumps, and while vernacular studies
isn't my speed, I love the way we used to talk.
We also used to say the autumn light is lambent
on the lake top, and the waves display a heraldic curl
as in halcyon days . . . and that was also a fine,
fine thing to say. Or that some multibody hid
his second exoneural projecto-self in a pocket of subspace,
masking it over with molecules of landscape-sim
. . . that's how they talk in sci-fi-ville, while over
in the empirical records of science, someone is saying
the reagent deliquesces although
in its previous state it underwent resorption. All
of the languages are appropriate to their purposes—are
fine. Jack Gilbert's poem in honor of wabi
—that's the Japanese word for, roughly,
finding a beauty in ruin that one can only
find in ruin—reminds us that to lack the word
for a concept is really to lack the concept.
Let the word occur, though, and then suddenly
in a fingersnap, in a trice, and like a bolt out of the blue,
I can see my friend for whom Estelle is an avatar
in stanza one, and the formerly unacknowledged
stores of dignity and perseverance
that carried her through the shame of the abortion
—her wabi—flower forth. One story goes
she fucked up big-time, Mick was a saint but nooo, she had to get knocked up by an asshole
like Kenny. Another story: her mind is part dissociative, and
so requires positive reinforcement from multiple sources.
Actually they're the same story, only told in different languages.
Or actually because they're different languages, they're
different stories. In mine, she's just returned
from the doctor, and needs to tell Mick. She's sitting
surrounded by thousands of happy memories—the light
through the louvers is lambent—but we all know
how the story goes: life is jim-dandy, a peacheroo, then
words get spoken, and overnight the whole world goes kablooey.
I was brought up Roman Catholic (at least until I was thirteen and refused to go any further and my mother grew disenchanted herself with the Catholic Church enough to not fight me). Sunday mass and CCD at St Martins, corner of Summit and Frederick in Olde Towne Gaithersburg Maryland. Here's the thing: while I never bought, even when young, the religion, I dug the rituals. This doesn't surprise you if you know me, the most ritual driven fuck I know. See the gag in the previous sentence. This past Saturday I attended the memorial service for my friend Steven Jackson, a good guy, in a beautiful small chapel on campus, in a beautiful small ceremony full of traditional rituals, candles and stained-glass and deafening silences of communal prayer and reflection. I was blissfully crushed by it. I am the most ritual driven fuck I know.
So, guess who I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head.
Seven thousand trillion floppy disks: What’s most striking here – even more explicitly than in the case of Gordon Bell’s vision ofthe dullest life imaginable, lived forever– is the connection between immortality and a surveillance society
described with all the tropes of the available dystopian literature.
Nowadays this connection is framed a little less crudely or naively, but
it survives inthe efforts to master immortality by the likes of Google,
whose overarching goal remains that of controlling and manipulating the
majority of the world’s personal information. Your past is who you are
and who you are is what the computer networks seek to acquire and
reproduce with absolute fidelity, until it’s more you than the original.
Hyper-text. Hyper-real.
Report from a Pere Ubu home concert. $1000, those of you who've been in my house can vouch that the big room, with Earthgirl's studio for a balcony, would be excellent, all I need do is get past the mortification I would feel as a slurpy fanboy so I can start soliciting attendees.
THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL
Albert Goldbarth
During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of his
officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was
approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand
across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his
lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them
all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly. —Guy Murchie
“He was mortared to death.”
A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.
—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either
makes a difference to the increasingly cooler
downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy
of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what
do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.
It might have been dying, announcing
its pain in those trilling pennants. It might
have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week
and never found by the volunteer searchers,
it might have been her ghost
with an admonishment. The truth is,
even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain
from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone
of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because
we know the urgency of some utterance;
and the intended goodwill of our listening; and
the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,
of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”
as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to
750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”
and she added that tired magic about how atoms
of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did
their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation
of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think
that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,
inflating her see-through empresswear
with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also
realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,
Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,
but also the smelly and scabby old man
from across the street who’d died last year
when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)
“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing
ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether
an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although
exempla abound, misapprehension
also dancing inside us at the atomic level.
Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked
the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down
and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,
so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,
and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl
or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you
we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,
of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds
that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving
into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,
I couldn’t have said if it was defeat
or relief. She couldn’t have said which one
she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew
that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,
and that our total errors, if spread out flat,
become the house we live in. They’re another system
inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,
they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when
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