Causes Pursue All Wobbly Deeds

Latest novel I've failed: *Huckleberry Finn,* was attempting a reread ahead of Percival Everett's *James* release next month. Other novels I've failed in 2024: McElroy's *Hind's Kidnap,* de la Pava's *Lost Empress,* a reread of Barth's *Sot-weed Factor,* Levin's *Mount Chicago,* Katz's new translation of Fyodor's *Brothers Karamazov,* and at least three others I can't remember and can't be bothered to go find. Today's headshot, gouache and acrylic ink



My eyes suck but are not the problem. I haven't watched a movie or television show in at least a decade not out of some performative moral protest but because they bore the fuck out of me and I'd rather listen to music and read poetry and novels instead and, as Life in the Clusterfuckocene saturates, overwhelms, and dominates my head, I now read three pages of a novel cognitively then ten more pages obliviously before awakening from the clusterfuck's miasma to realize I retain nothing of those ten pages and discover I have no desire to read further. It's not boredom, it's not disinterest, it's, I've told you this three times (I can't imagine rereading Vollmann's *Dying Grass,* quite possibly my favorite novel ever, where that telling you three time gag is from) I am being reprogrammed by clusterfuckaires and not only do I not resist, I'm a solipsistically greedy addict, it's kinda dark in here

"You have to vote for the Democrats; they’re the only thing preventing fascism"
White House attempted to hide arms shipments for Israeli genocide
"What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood."
Palestine And The Worthlessness Of The Western Liberal
Today in Rhetorical Questions: Why is the US administration only pretending to pressure Israel?
"This is genuinely the quiet part out loud of most admonishments from liberals"
"Neoliberal warmonger tries to take a poem and frame it as a mental illness to dunk on the left."
"Rachel Maddow is a perfect example of the liberal "upright sodomite" imperial lesbian. She spent her entire career ignoring Israel/Palestine. Now it's her shining moment: pushing genocide entirely out of the conversation in the name of *saving democracy.*"
"Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame"
IDF celebrates the destruction of Gaza’s nonprofit Society for Deaf Children
Our swearing is a good barometer of the sensibilities of our culture
The Constitution Turned Upside Down
Professional Democrats creating a police state, always
The Arctic Ocean could be ‘ice-free’ within the decade
The Torturers’ Poor Memories
Tibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused”
The Desire to Be Visible
Today in Rhetorical Questions: BALTIMORE TOUTS EQUALITY, SO WHY DID IT LAVISH TENS OF MILLIONS IN TAX BREAKS ON A SINGLE DEVELOPMENT: HARBOR EAST?
Why Has the White Working Class Embraced Trump?
Today in Rhetorical Questions: Why is Oklahoma making it easier for pedos?
I, for one, have always been a spiritual lesbian
Today in Rhetorical Questions: Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad?
Mandate of reviewers					Robber Barons
PUBLIC CONVOs: “INCEST AND AFRO-AMERICAN LITERATURE” & “WHY IS DFW A RED FLAG FOR PEOPLE?
Unknown Language #17			Frederick Flying Cows?
A friend gifted me *Graffiti on Low or No Dollars* yesterday and am eager to start and fail it, the author interviewed here
Lyn Hejinian’s Counterlife

[ONCE A POIGNANT CATALYST....]

Lyn Hejinian

    Once a poignant catalyst was lodged in the Y of a tree
    No, not a poignant catalyst  - the poignancy of the catalyst, like the catalyzing of the poignancy, came later
    A bee landed on a fallen peach
    A beloved man struck a table with the flat of his hand
    A sailor reached terra incognito without water and found it overrun with sheep
    Why?

                        Causes pursue all wobbly deeds

Whipped Gouache Just About Covers the Situation

People important in my formative years (real life, academic life, novelists & poets, musicians) dying faster and faster all the freaking time. I've been using fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck as a label, thinking I will add a Dead This Year blegroll on January 1, 2023 with links to the respective fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck post, would do one for this year but that would be research... This getting old shit. Dying so fast I forget who died yesterday because someone else just died five minutes ago, the fuck

Two more CMcV songs for RIP. I've always thought of her as Mac's George, especially in the B-N years, band-dynamically, and holyfuck, her songs, the deepcuts





In ominous news for you, when I opened the bag from the art store in Baltimore to get my new watercolor brushes and new jug of Mod Podge I discover L's new tubes of red, blue, and yellow gouache, I'd never gouached before, uh-oh & o my, just in time, I've used up most of my fountain pen ink, maybe I don't need to (wash my hands with pumice everytime I use my fountain pen ink and watercolor washes) buy any more, at least not now, laugh, my first and certainly not last gouache ever:

A black man was lynched this week in Missouri
Missouri couldn't wait to lynch Kevin Johnson
White Americans have voted majority GOP in the last fourteen presidential elections
A eulogy for the emperor penguin
How capitalism destroyed the internet
Does this dipshit actually believe Biden isn't a corporate henchman who is just "missing an opportunity"?
Bipartisanship, fellow mooks						Motherfucking Democrats
It's imperialism, stupid, part						ONE	TWO
I wrote a twoot at my congressmotherfucker
Why America's railroads refuse to give workers sick leave
My state's two motherfucking Democratic senators voted to fuckover railworkers
The City of Blind Windows, part						ONE	TWO
We hike through pawpaw groves all the time, rarely find one, animals get them first when they fall
Dream houses			Fluke events of acts of dog?
Avedon Carol's occasional links
The trouble w money				The trouble w normal
I vouch for Durban Poison but recommend the Superboof
#1278		Memory		It's not about the money
On the new Kathy Acker biography
The weak novel is a performance
Neil Young embraces imperfection
My daughter did not tweet this though she has said it to me

THE UNFOLLOW: 49

Lyn Hejinian

A star screen shimmers under the moon over the urban center flashing on it red

         and green

I’ll have a suspension, mustard, topicality, glue

Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty

Whipped gouache just about covers the situation

In the Musée Unless there’s a fallen nest on display empty of an egg once

         belonging to a song bird, species unknown, which had sung

See style, see working late, see mismatched socks, see polyphony

It is the fate of logic infinitely to undo closure but that’s just to say that it’s the

         fate of logic infinitely to be logical

So like a man goes into a shop and there’s like this other man in there whom he

         thinks he recognizes and he says like do I know you

The fallen grass in winter sprawls its spring

Regulations state that the pier can accommodate no more than one troupe of

         acrobats, thirty fishermen, or fifty tourists

Yo

The child never gives up her secret, which—don’t tell—is that she has a secret,

         and her secret has a penis

We will lose another day from the inner picture—days are not ineradicable there

What is it that one is autobiographical about

Novelty Is No Better Than Repetition

• Fleabus in a hamper last night. Fleabus has rallied from her depression at Olive's arrival. She can only be a kitten for bursts - she is ten? eleven? twelve? - but she's bursting to be a kitten again.
• Every major snowstorm's approach and delivery since I got my drivers license forty years ago PISSED ME OFF! until tonight's/tomorrow's. This time? I'm ready to be marooned.
• It is a shame to waste on a weekend: I wish the storm obliterated a week of work, but.
• I have no plans to publish or not publish  during the storm, nor do I wish for outages, though internet before power, please.
• I hoped briefly & mehly for an internet outage, where's the quitting in that?
• Elizabeth Warren was tweeted last night, she was making her I'm a rebel, Dottie noises about motherfucking Triskelions. Folk were oh my, my hero!
• I posed a question on twuuter, how much pleasure would I - and you, I guess, if you want to play - get from watching Clinton Inc FREAK THE FUCK OUT! if Bernie Sanders this Saturday stood in front of a rapturous Iowa City crowd and introduced Elizabeth Warren as his running mate to-be?
• I'm gonna enjoy this Trump phenomenon, especially and predominantly in light of who Sanders and Warren will be endorsing for POTUS come summer.
• Moderation.
• Cowboy Isis.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• Medial neglect and black boxes.
• On CD Wright's poetry.
• UPDATE! New P.J. Harvey song!
• Gnod?

THE WATER WAS RISING

Lyn Hejinian

The water was rising, I got up on the bed

Still wearing the Hawaiian shirt he had on yesterday

He used his thoughts to draw a rudimentary circle on the wall

Hitting Beirut and killing 22 civilians

But now go the bells, and we are ready

Novelty is no better than repetition

That graces the walls of toilet stalls with hooey

And comparison with the dead—their slimy cruelty—and meatballs

Perched like ghostly birds

Believing in old men’s lies, then too late unbelieving

There’s rough life in the rust

Long-buried whore’s eggs, razor-clams with shells

Pirates dressed in pink and pit-bulls on parade

With power to extend the longevity of learned fear in the mouse

And a heron on the horizon many sewing-days ago

Jane, Jane, ascend the stairs

Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn

Thus predicting the shock to the tale that so entertains grown children

Of the animals that have nearly all forsaken us

Somewhere in the Mess of Graphs and Math and Compass You Tried to Make me Follow Rules

I know, I said I wasn't going to post any more of these Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambiers but some of the photos in this one are gorgeous (plus there is only one KFHHCMWWZG left after this one). Yes, I know you're not going to watch it. Harder driving days - gray, rain, road-spray, fog - make for GREAT! photographing days, or so I'm told. This slideshow would seem to confirm the theory. Expect pieces from these in Earthgirl's big show this September. Expect one mememe in the show - Earthgirl is letting me hang one. HEY! Dave played Dog Faced Hermans last night, in comments for the show he intimates it's for me (though on the fly - I'm sure the band was in his queue before the show started).

• Wraith.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Lyn Hejinian: Turbulent Thinking.
• In a Hagerstown Sheetz, Triskelion Doritos.
• digression as reply.
• On Agota Kristof's Trilogy.
• I've given reread Coover's Origin of the Brunists last fall in anticipation of reading his new Brunists' Day of Wrath, two hundred pages in, uh-oh, I don't seem able to summon a damn.
• Science fiction short stories review, for those of you who do.
• The assumption is that the hyphen between Dog and Faced is present if invisible. The Hermans are dog-faced. It could be a single dog who confronted a contentious bunch of Hermans.

PLUTO SHITS ON THE UNIVERSE

Fatimah Asghar

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.

My bad. Your graph said I was supposed

to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can

chart me. All the other planets, they think

I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped

moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.

Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t

shit but a day to me. I could spend your

whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking

about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy

on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day

is barely the start of my sunset.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold

you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.

And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.

Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass

you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your

rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun

I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more

copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.

Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,

and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.

I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids

in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:

wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.

They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other

planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like

a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:

the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

Invincible Is My Myopia, Great Is My Waist, Choral Are My Ideas, Wingéd Are My Eyebrows, Deep Is My Obscurity

• Today's abridged bleggalgaze: see post title.
• Though I do want to say thanks for recent links & Kind. It makes me happy on two levels, one decent and impure, one indecent and pure.
• The deaf vocation of a troll.
• In a reversal of usual sillyass gag protocols, the poem came before the gag.
• Unearthly beauty.
• Religious me-dom.
• License to kill.
• Jim's road trip's photolog.
• Airport's latest playlist.
• RIP Tomas Transtromer.
• Oops. Not the article I want to read about Stephin Merritt who I am seeing in concert twice in May.
• Reminder: Six Organs of Admittance playing DC9 on Sunday April 26, Mr Alarum and me already have tickets, if you want one - on me - let me know.

PONDERABLE

Lyn Hejinian

The pine branches reach—the rain! the sun! the edge of the moving air!
       three goats!
Girls on razor scooters turn the corner and scoot
Autonomy actually shows, it shines amidst the stars of decision
I sacrifice hearing to writing, I return to the back of the train
Surrounded by nothing but tattered island nasturtia, the shoveler is
       prepared to exclaim, “Grief exterior, grief prison”
Beastly pine cones are falling from the sky
Down in the middle, and a soft wall, the midnight breeze billows
Check the role, the rock, the rule!
From cardboard pressed to ginger, water spilled on a list, salt sprinkled
        over…
Why so many references to dogs, purple, and bananas?
Then the carnival—it came up afterwards like a vermillion buttress to
        say of itself “it appears”
Wren in a ragged bee line, flora sleeping live
Yuki, Felicia, and Maxwell have between them $13.75, and they are
             hungry as they enter the small café, where they see a display of
             pies and decide to spend all their money on pie there and then—
             how much pie will each get to eat if each pie costs $5.25?
Invincible is my myopia, great is my waist, choral are my ideas, wingéd

             are my eyebrows, deep is my obscurity—who am I?

surpassing things we've known before passing on its effect

       There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheyenne felt especial put upon, for by their lights they had always been amiable to white men. Even after all these bad things, they sent a delegation to see the Government Indian agent and apologized. They also returned a woman they had captured. but you see the complication was this: Indians wasn't ever organized. Them that come in to apologize wasn't the same as what killed the whites. And them that the soldiers usually punished was never the ones who had committed the outrages. The white people on who the Indians took revenge had no connection with the soldiers.
     It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn't nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.

Thomas Berger, Little Big Man

Yesterday two blogfriends discussed Berger on Twooter, I didn't stop to think why, adding to the conversation that when I read Little Big Man when I was nineteen it was KABOOM! Today I discovered why he might have been being discussed: he died this past July 13th.

It has been years since I read Berger. I liked the Reinhart Tetrology, especially when read against Updike's Rabbit Tetrology for comparison and contrast in style, tone, themes, I liked his second historical novel, Arthur Rex, I liked some of his genre-examining novels like Who Is Teddy Villanova and Nowhere, but all failed when measured against Little Big Man. I didn't know it when I read it, but it engaged many of the concerns I encountered in Theory in grad school, especially but not limited to its examination of passing: see the excerpt above. I am about to find out if it's KABOOM! still.

• If you want one and I like you I can send you a copy.
• A friend of mine recommended Silver Apples to me. I vaguely remember the name, it sounds familiar (I think it was on the soundtrack for the Needwood Summer ePod 1979 - ask Elric), but I'd never have been able to put the sound to the name.
• Have mercy, do you have a heart?
• Osama bin Laden in the Wall Street Journal.
• The Terror War's disastrous course.
• I heard from Arthur Silber yesterday, he can really use your help, please consider throwing him the coins in your pocket.
• The true cost of a burger.
• I daydream I am.
• Thirty "essential" Emo songs? Jawbox was emo?

[constant change figures]

Lyn Hejinian

constant change figures

the time we sense

passing on its effect

surpassing things we've known before

since memory

of many things is called

experience

but what of what

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we call

since memory

we call nature's picture

surpassing things we've known before

constant change figures

experience

passing on its effect

but what of what

constant change figures

since memory

of many things is called

the time we sense

called nature's picture

but what of what

in the time we sense

surpassing things we've known before

passing on its effect

is experience

Ghosts' Perennial Goal of Revoking the Sensation of Repose

• See bottom bullet for more, but my eyes ache after an hour of reading novels, ease but ache again after an hour of reading poetry, which is not excuse but part explanation why I fish links to post on days very few read since I'm reading online anyway, which doesn't hurt my eyes, or maybe does when I read from a book. As for the rash of thwarted bleggalgazing of late, I had a long email from L last night, the Death of Thursday Night Pints has denied me a vital spigot.
• The Disruption Machine: Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.
• Another murderous milestone: Our 21st century intervention in Iraq has killed far more people much more quickly, of course. But as we gear up for yet another round of slaughter in the country we have recently demolished, it’s good to be reminded that none of this is new or unusual; it is, very simply — and quite horribly — the way the bipartisan American elite do business. Violence is their profession, their religion, their guiding light. They use violence to advance their agenda, then use more violence to deal with the inevitable horrific consequences spawned by their violence, on and on in an endless cycle.

• Guess what I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head. Click tab in footer for more. Expect more in coming days. MSADI5G, yes, they are in the inner circle.
• But yes, Fuck It, Fuck This, Fuck Me.
• The Obscene.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Sacasas's links.
• Reality Check.
• The cost of almost apprehending anything.
• He, for one, welcomes our invisible piano-teacher overlords.
• If Brazil ends up winning this World Cup remember that Chilean ball of the crossbar in the 120th. And I suspect that if anyone is going to beat Brazil it will be Colombia.
• See, Solar Crumpet works as long as I'm not distracted but I'm easily distracted and my eyes are old and ache after an hour. Long ago I made a rule that I can only read one novel at a time - I'm curious re: my dilemma when I finish Sawn Yawns - do I immediately go to A Bounded Thriving Wig or read something else? I put down Sawn Yawns at eye ache, picked up Hejinian (another rule: no music permitted when reading novels, music allowed when reading poetry) and found my This Heat on the iPod.

[A DREAM, STILL CLINGING LIKE LIGHT TO THE DARK, ROUNDING]

Lyn Hejinian

A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life - that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark"
Emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead - there's no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn't that the problem with beauty - that it's apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day - it has the psychical quality of "pastness" and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.

I’ll Get a Library Card at Last and I Won’t Pay $100 for It Feeling Tired but Only as Tired as One Would Normally Feel at Sea Level After, Say, a Five Hour Hike

Earthgirl's leg is (a) better (b) worse (c) we have no fucking idea. (Background here for those who don't know/are curious why Earthgirl's knees are on the blog - short version, she took a bad spill on the trail last Sunday - and there were updates during the week.) The bruise migrates. She wouldn't have been able to hike today regardless because of a school project with the 5th graders but she wouldn't have be able to hike today because of her leg. She hopes she can hike next weekend. I'm out the door in ten minutes to do a seven mile circuit on Sugarloaf. I wish Earthgirl could join me. I love hiking by myself.

Have I been talking about electric cigarettes on this blog? I don't recall talking about electric cigarettes on this blog, but in the past week I've sixteen comments complimenting me on this blog's design and content and offering me links to discount pricing on top of the line electric cigarettes. I guess the bots have concluded they've solved my discount Viagra problem for me. It occurred to me that it was about this time last year that I enabled moderation in comments (and not for the comments the spam filter doesn't block) and looking back in archives it is. I was right to enable moderation, though I apologize for the delays that sometimes occur between when a comment is made and the comment is posted. Thanks to all who still play.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico:

• :-p's Life Lessons.
• I've yodeled about this before, have a long yodel written and in the digital freezer, but Thunder's comment yesterday on the Death of Liberalism draws these sentences out of me: I know honorable Liberals who, while not putting it this way themselves, feel that Liberalism went further in America then could have been dreamed of a hundred years ago, that Liberalism's retreat is inevitable, that advancing a Liberal economic agenda is impossible, and that the most achievable goal for current Liberals is to preserve as much of the economic gains vis a vis Robber Barons as possible. My opinion is, how should I put it, incoherent.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The Baffler's week that was.
• It's crap like moving a game to motherfucking FedEx field that's killing my United damn.
• On the difficulty of reading poetry in translation.
• Faye reminded me last night of Bogshed:

[HOME WHOSE NAMES ARE PRODUCED BY MOTION]

Lyn Hejinian

Home whose names are produced by motion   

is where people go (one following

the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself   

at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot   

the tales of which are spinning like blades   

on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate   

and desire, chance and intention, from time to time   

converge. Most people want things to be good   

but taking a programmatic approach to getting it

would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you   

except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy

at this very moment is screaming in jubilation   

at a silver toaster, I want it

even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down   

mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know   

the ones. The purport comes all at once   

at the end in such a way that one is thrown back

to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is

about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it

feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level   

after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same

when it was just getting light—a murky gray

that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break   

away from my conversations in order to barge in   

on yours and give the illusion that I often know   

where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty   

of motive to propel the prose

or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing   

where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip

will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience.   

There are birds chirping, smoke is rising

from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer   

and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive

sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge   

of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus   

I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!”   

I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel   

that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that   

after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing   

but motion to the composition.

The Alphabet and the Cello Can Represent Horses but I Can Only Pretend to Be a Dog Slurping Pudding

Bryce played Felix Kubin yesterday. Bryce's show is my favorite three hours of radio each week. Yes, an unintended though fortunate tradition has arisen here: what interests me most from Bryce's show is often played here Saturday. I seek out Friday evening what Bryce played Friday afternoon to hear more, learn more, hope to discover new things via ricochet and tangents. Sometimes I own some of the music, most often not, as was the case with Kubin, who I know of but don't know much. I go to WFMU and in the search box on the left column I type the name of the musician and/or band and then look at the songs in the all the playlists the music appears then find the music if possible. Sometimes, depending of when and how WFMU archived their shows there are convenient pop-ups, but WFMU only began providing the pop-up format a couple of years ago, most of the time I need find the songs on youtube or elsewhere. I did this for Kubin last night. Turns out I don't find Kubin that interesting (I'll take the blame), though in looking at playlists I was reminded of Laurie Spiegel whose Expanding Universe is one of my favorite albums. Spent last night with it, in fact.







More Spiegel later, but here, a hastily shot video from my dining room yesterday morning, a 30 second clip of  (extraordinary bad quality) robins, mad with hunger, in a holly bush.





    

• Earthgirl was with me, she can vouch: There must have been five, six dozen. They stripped that holly of berries in ten minutes. The ferals watched from the back porch (judging, I anthropomorphize, eight inches of heavy melting snow made for poor hunting), the insides watched from the dining table.
• I am so dope I think if I find something interesting all others, not just some others (much less no one) will find it interesting too (though a friend did tweet that he liked the Spiegel I tweeted last night). Fine metaphors abounding, life in general, this blog in particular. The same dope mechanism works for repeating gags I find funny.
• Wiki says a Spiegel piece was used for the "cornucopia scene" in the movie version of The Hunger Games. Forgive me if I don't draw the same gratuitous moral outrage at this as I did at motherfucking Eric Clapton's motherfucking Michelob commercial thirty-five years ago. I'm older, hope I'm smarter about how stupid I am for gratuitous moral outrage, save it for grander stupider things. Plus Clapton sucked long before the Michelob commercial and even longer after.
• This blog had a fuckload more readers when I indulged my gratuitous moral outrage on a large daily basis.
• The vile mood, lifted. I was asked last night by a dear friend why I've changed (and changed for the better, she claims). I said I haven't changed. She cited examples, gave me a chance to consider before I'd deny and she could call me a liar. I conceded. It's too much work, I said, to think everyone of bad faith even if the faith they have is bad in my bad faith opinion. 
• This post did not start out to be intentionally relatively link free - it did set out to be a lazyass weekend post - but check the blogrolls, people by and large are (sensibly) hibernating. 
• Re: the above - bleggalgazing.
• The above method for finding the benefits of ricochets and tangents in music works for poetry too! Find a favorite poem and type what you think is a keyword into the search box of Poetry Foundation, for instance, and see what poets you had forgot, hadn't thought about it years, never heard of, pop up, then read them.

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[A STRAIGHT RAIN IS RARE]

Lyn Hejinian

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions

and I hold that names begin histories

and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending

to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden

and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs

can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness

can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once,

my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet

and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend

to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish

my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow

indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see

the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere

between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me

and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains

and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases

are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all

in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.