Sixty-Two Yesterday, Seventy Today

My responsibilities as Knez of Egoslavia demand these songs and the following:

Andy Partridge born sixty-two years ago yesterday, Neil Young is seventy today. The former is in the innermost circle of musicians rotating in and out of the three open seats of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, the latter has always been on my life's soundtrack, most of the time when I wanted it to be, now and then when I didn't. Here's Conkin's Neil show. You'll need take my word for it - I pasted Walk Like a Giant below before I saw his show playlist. Click XTC, click Neil Young, for more songs.

Fuckitybarkbarkity

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    .

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

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I Dropped a Vollmann Hardback on My Keyboard & Now U Don't Exist

See Tags

everything. It cheats, the dark

This time tomorrow we will be uphill on 68 from LaVale to Finzel. It's our last trip to Gambier - Planet graduates from college Saturday. More, or more probably not, later. These Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier and visa versa posts, complete with soundtrack and slide show of the hundreds of photos snapped by Earthgirl along the way and travelogue, are my favorite posts to write, the least favorite for you to read (except for posts like this), so while I will certainly write about the trip and listen to music and make a slide show of her photos for Earthgirl, I will spare you. Today, the anti-soundtrack, songs to lighten my mood - that good news from a doctor sparked a descent into the dark doesn't surprise me, not thinking only about me and my immediate concerns freed me to look up and remember the world - and songs Earthgirl will not let me play in the car. Not to worry, you won't listen to them either. This either, holyfuck. Yes, the poems, written a year ago, don't worry, you won't read them. Back, eventually, or not.

Waxing with Intent

I now own a wax wienermobile, cast for only two dollars and dispensed hot from mold at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan. The museum houses the original wienermobile. Mocomofos, remember when Glenn Brenner drove the wienermobile up and down Wisconsin Ave NW? Hey! I've successfully driven away more than three-quarters of my readership since abandoning the daily aargh-aggregation and, to a much lesser extent, my daily aargh-barking. I knew that quitting the daily aargh-aggregation would decrease readership (and thank you to those of you still here who dig the mwah-aggregation and music and other people's poems). It's not as if this blog is aargh-free or ever will be should I ever truly desire it (and, more impossibly, am capable of desiring it). Still, since importing my other blogs and reposting some old pieces and poems as well as new pieces and poems, a stunningly dramatic drop in readers: if I admit very few want poetry at any time I must also admit of those few fewer want mine. This post is a celebratory dirge - I don't want to pose otherwise - and I am stupidly delighted to bemoan a result I precipitated and anticipated. That sentence is the point of this post and needed typed and posted to get it shat out of my system. Success: the most ironic English word and best onomatopoeia. And yes, when I fed two dollars into the wax-welder and cast my wienermobile Friday morning I laughed, I knew I would use it today, for this post, it made writing this post a happy necessity (and yes, further advances the cause).

[My ophthalmologist insists...]

My ophthalmologist insists
my constant cataclysmic visions
are not glitch of glaucoma prescription
but my apocalypse-jones spiking.
Can I get my Timolol refill anyway, I ask.

What Is the Poet's Job Out of Numbed Slumber?

If you don't own and listen regularly to Wedding Present's George Best, do yourself a kind. Guess what I listened to last night. Hey, twenty-four hours from the time stamp of this post Earthgirl and I will be on an airplane to Detroit. Planet's Air is an Art Major at Michigan, his senior show opening is tomorrow night, we get to see Detroit, Ann Arbor, rural Michigan this weekend. Planet and Air have been together five years, we get to meet Air's parents for the first time. I'm told they are nice, please pray for me anyway. Despite few look at the slideshows I post I will possibly if not probably post at least one since Planet thinks I will find Detroit fascinatingly photographic, and she will be driving so I will have two hands free in a moving car for the first time in, um, ages. I doubt there will be links though that's because Dead Blegsylvania be deader than ever even if I had the time to link-fish which I possibly if not probably and hopefully won't. And what would you have me yodel? Yes, the below is possibly if not probably one of the ten most posted songs of this shitty blog's history.








MAELSTROM: ONE DROP MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN

Anne Waldman

All the world is one, like an angry deity’s essence dropped in the ocean
becoming monstrous: what happens Mumbai happens Paris
What happens Vicenza U.S. Base or Prodi, Kyoto Accord, XL Pipeline
advanced warplanes to Japan—what happens?  Egypt, Yemen, Syria
NASA’s five space probes or Aurora Borealis where we study shimmering light
What happens on the Lunar New Year
I want to know, Professor, are there names for these mercurial moves?
A lexicon & vibration touch the complexity of gestural motion
What happened with Augustine & his mother in Ostia?
I want to know what happens Nicea 325 perhaps God creates the  world!
Let’s go back and check this out: Ex nihilio ardore/splendore
Europe still riding the pull of Zeus a nuclear reactor not dismantled
Heads coming off in cruelest acts, unspeakable
And how that is part of your story too—flooding in Mozambique,
in Morocco, in Indonesia a part of you all suffering a part of you
What happens Rwanda, Darfur, Chad, Ukraine, glaciers shrinking what happens
when carbon-capped bombs fall on Natanz? on Bushehr
What is the poet’s job out of numbed slumber?
Entering post-poet-modernity I gave my larynx a workout
Started chanting for the redemption of Irreparable
Om Ah Hum for the Year of the Shy but Cunning Metal Rabbit,
Inshallah O Peace Brutal Year of the Wooden Horse
The Gentle Sheep Year O Help us Now, Shalom Ah Hum, Shanti

Sunrise Over Temporary Cubicle, or: Bleggalgaze

I know why I need prove to myself that my favorite posts are the least read, but here I am again.

I Guess It's Too Late to Start Struggling to Remain Standing in a Transparent Plastic Cubicle Filled with Wet Clay, Repeatedly Slipping and Falling

Yesterday. They ripped out my old cubicle and installed my new cubicle. I could buy two new cars with the money it cost to buy these cubicles. Observe closely. Psst. It looks like my old cubicle. Then I went and got sushi in Glen Echo, their one speaker 1980's tape decker/radio played Surrender. Saved the day.

It's Like a Dog Is Standing on My Face

NEW SONG! Yes, posted again this morning after posting it last night. I am still slain and smitten. Here's what a dope I am: I am surprised everyone isn't as slain and smitten as I am, isn't as profoundly joyful at a new Bonnie Prince Billy song as I am. Isn't as floored at the brilliant dog bark solo as I am. Fine metaphors abound.

You're the Only Serious Person in the Room, Aren't You, the Only One Who *Understands,* and You Can Prove It by the Fact that You've Never Finished a Single Thing in Your Life

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

William Gaddis, born ninety-two years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.

Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).

- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

- Gaddis, JR

I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.

- Gaddis, Recognitions

My Favorite Last Post Since My Last Favorite Last Post Until My Next Favorite Last Post

Seas Where Schools of Fools Be First

Forgive me, I love this song. See post title. It might be this blog's record holder for number of times it's been Theme Song of the Month (beloveds can vouch even while expressing bemused puzzlement), but roughly a year and a half ago it disappeared completely from youtube, not just this particular version and not just this particular video but any version and all videos completely. Ten minutes ago I had the bridge of a Camera Obscura song in my head, it couldn't figure out which one, have I even mentioned my compulsive/obsessive tendencies? there was no choice but to find the Camera Obscura song, went to youtube and... found this and posted immediately, I assume it will disappear again. Will obsess over the Camera Obscura song next time if there is one. Forgive me, I will rebump this as new at the top of new post hence the comments turned off - chastise me tomorrow. Forgive me, fuck it, fuck me, fuck this. Forgive me: I love this song.

If the Rich Can Survive Dust-Storms Thanks to Their Red-and-Gold Liveried Postilions, Then You Are Playing with an Alphabet Here: Nothing You Invent Can Be a Plenipotentiary, Turn Itself Inside-Out, Radiate Iron Spokes at the Mini-Landscape, and So Side with a Population of Bears, Who Knows?

Earthgirl and I gave ourselves a weekend, a drive Saturday southwest to below Charlottesville to hike to the top Crabtree Falls then a good dinner and sleep in Staunton (pronounced STAN-ton, don't you know), then yesterday drove the entire Skyline Drive south-to-north, stopping to hike the Rose River Loop. The video above is Earthgirl's photos of the Rose River Loop hike. Look for the bear - we saw two, only one stayed around long enough to be photoed. Oh heck, because I love you, here's a  mini-movie of the bear:







Crabtree Falls was OK, very crowded, full of fools, uphill immediately which is - for me - the worst a hike can start - no chance to warm up, to find the breathing rhythm, for old knees and ankles to loosen before work. Rose River Loop was wonderful, a hard hike with a payoff. It's the typical Shenandoah National Park hike: straight downhill on side trails off the Skyline Drive/Appalachian Trail spine through gorges and hollows and then straight uphill back in a loop. The Hog Camp Branch uphill of the loop was longer, steeper than Crabtree Falls uphill but not nearly as hard. We picked up the latest book of circuit hikes in Shenandoah at the Visitor Center at Big Meadows. Our $15 pass for entering Skyline Drive yesterday is good through next Sunday, so....

• There's a story about The Bears and a concert we saw at the original 930 back in 1987. Ask Hamster.
• Today's dose of aargh: What US citizens need to know about Israel and Palestine.
• One more: Massacre of the innocents. On Gaza.
• One more: James Boyd's (and our) hell.
• Briefer futility: a bleggalgaze, reminiscent of bleggalgazes elsewhere, with more determination to act rationally on its conclusion than that other guy.
• Outer Heaven in our time.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• Oh, the World Cup. The better team won, the lesser team should have one, gacked two sitters, but that's why they are the lesser team. And shut the fuck up, Higuain, you choking whiner.
• After Planet texted us photos of a foster puppy she met on Sunday I thought of Jim's post on his puppies this past Saturday. We set ourselves up for heartbreak.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Blogfriend reviews blogfriend's novel. Ed had sent me a copy, I promptly set it down, it got caught up in a house-cleaning, I searched and found it last week or two, it's next.
• The Last Ramone.
• I know enough about jazz to know the name Charlie Haden, not enough to make a playlist for you. Here, Kurt does.

KOREAN SOAP OPERA

John Ashbery

My sister and I don’t seem to get along too well anymore. 
She always has to have everything new in her house. Cherished ideals 
don’t suit her teal, rust and eggshell color scheme. 
Of course, I was a buyer when she was still on the street 
peddling the Communist youth weekly. I have a degree 
in marketing. Her boyfriend thinks I’m old-fashioned. 
Well, I guess I do have an old-fashioned mentality. 
What kind of a mentality 
causes men to commit suicide in their air-conditioned glass boxes? 
It has been a life of adjustments. I adjusted to the postwar boom 
though it broke up my family. Some took their honor to the mountains, 
to live on wood and water. But the investment years 
wrought havoc with the landscape. Everything is modular now, even the trees. 
Under the dizzying parabolas of the railroad bridge, where the thud 
of laundry mallets used to resound, the swiftly flowing 
current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling. 
So old are the ways, 
for lunch one might select a large smelly radish. 
In the streets, as always, there is a smell of frying fish 
no one notices. The rain cannot make up its mind. 
Other people like it other ways. 
I need to interact with postal employees, civil servants, that sort of thing. 
Just being asleep isn’t enough. 
I must cry out against injustice in whatever position 
sleep overtakes me. Only then will I have understood what the world 
and servants mean by self-abolishment, the key, it is said, 
to success. To stand and contemplate the sea 
is to comprehend part of the package. What we need, therefore, 
is market gardens bringing a sense of time with them, 
of this time, honed to razor-sharpness. Yet the whole 
scheme is invisible to any shareholder, and so the feeling 
lessens, the idea that a composite portrait 
may not be so important after all takes over like the shoulder 
of a mill-wheel, slogging patiently under water, then back 
to the zenith, where the watchword presumably is. 
In schools they teach things like plus and minus 
but not in the gorge, not in boiling mud. 
Area residents were jolted to find what in essence 
was a large swamp, pythons and all, in their communal front yard. 
To me, this is insensate. I cannot stand the wind at my back 
making of me nothing, to be handed 
over, in turn, to this 
man, this man. For though he weathered patiently 
the name, the one that occurs to all of us, he went out 
and came in, not in the best interests of abundance; 
not, it seems, being anything but about to fall. 
Here’s a paradox for you: if the men are segregated 
then why are the women not? 
If the rich can survive dust-storms thanks to their red-and-gold liveried 
postilions, then you are playing with an alphabet here: nothing 
you invent can be a plenipotentiary, 
turn itself inside-out, radiate 
iron spokes at the mini-landscape, and so side with a population 
of bears, who knows? Who knows how much there can be 
of any one thing if another one stops existing? And the word you give to this 
man, this man, is cold, 
fossil fuel. 
One snorts in the laundry, another 
is broken beside the bed. A third is suspended 
in a baobab for all the sins 
no one ever knew, for sins of omission are like pearls 
next to the sin of not knowing, and being excused 
for it. So it all comes round 
to individual responsibility and awareness, 
that circus of dusty dramas, denuded forests and car dealerships, a place 
where anything can and does happen, and hours and hours go by.

The Prevalence of Those Grey Flakes Falling?

Per occasionally observed tradition, Saturday's music via Bryce's Friday show, the best three hours of radio each week. These are the musicians but not the pieces Bryce played, except the Radigue - I couldn't find the pieces he played on youtube. This is why I write about rules. A blogfriend has recently returned from a hiatus, I asked him why the hiatus, why the return. I think about a hiatus, think I only think about hiatus because of Kindnesses not reciprocated or content here not being appreciated, but then I smack my self sensible: I mean, it's partially true (and to be honest, this bleg is, within the climate of Blegsylvania vis a vis the ten years of it's existence, doing fine, and thanks), but I've long known that I'm both niche and licorice, I've long figured out the patterns of Blegsylvanian busy and slow. My blogfriend was beaten silent by relentless clusterfuck, how to respond with proper arrgh to the awfulness of the daily duh. It's important to be reminded of the awfulness of the daily duh, aargh consisting of too fucking many reminders of duh. It's not that I think of a hiatus from blogging, I daydream of a clusterfuck-free blog - you, those of you still here, may notice - but I cannot rid myself of the idea of a bogus duty to acknowledge the awfulness of the daily duh not only here but in all iterations of my life. It's how I was trained. And now that I'm being desensitized daily by faster fresh reiterations of duh - there was a shooting somewhere a couple of nights ago, half a dozen killed, dozens wounded, or something, plus routine atrocities since - now that I'm being trained that the daily duh of clusterfuck is in fact routine, move along, and I do, I...

... can vouch for these pieces of music, tomorrow's a High Egoslavian Holy Day, tune in, rest assured, I'll never go longform aargh on you, there are much better than me, let me link to them, have more Ashbery poems.








HOW TO CONTINUE

John Ashbery

Oh there once was a woman

and she kept a shop

selling trinkets to tourists

not far from a dock

who came to see what life could be

far back on the island.

And it was always a party there

always different but very nice

New friends to give you advice

or fall in love with you which is nice

and each grew so perfectly from the other

it was a marvel of poetry

and irony

And in this unsafe quarter

much was scary and dirty

but no one seemed to mind

very much

the parties went on from house to house

There were friends and lovers galore

all around the store

There was moonshine in winter

and starshine in summer

and everybody was happy to have discovered

what they discovered

And then one day the ship sailed away

There were no more dreamers just sleepers

in heavy attitudes on the dock

moving as if they knew how

among the trinkets and the souvenirs

the random shops of modern furniture

and a gale came and said

it is time to take all of you away

from the tops of the trees to the little houses

on little paths so startled

And when it became time to go

they none of them would leave without the other

for they said we are all one here

and if one of us goes the other will not go

and the wind whispered it to the stars

the people all got up to go

and looked back on love

AS ONE PUT DRUNK INTO THE PACKET-BOAT

John Ashbery

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight
Filters down, a little at a time,
Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,
As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree....

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all teh small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Look, I've Already Ruined It or It's Ruined Me

If I'd known - rather, if I'd thought to look, though I've no idea whether I could place a bet online at a European oddsmaker - I'd have put $10 on this:

The online bookmaker Betsafe had been offering odds of 175-1 that the Uruguayan, twice banned for biting, would sink his teeth into an opponent during the World Cup in Brazil. Sure enough, more than 100 gamblers decided that it was worth a punt. When Suárez seemingly did just that to Chiellini near the end of their Group D clash in Natal, it was time to celebrate.

Easy money. As is any bet that I couldn't go more than six months without daydreaming of changing this blog's appearance. I'm not going to - yet - since it's not this blog's appearance but it's content that I daydream most about changing. I dicked around and created another joint for giggles and fuck it and fuck me and probable abandonment, not even writing there - yet, he says - what I don't allow myself to write here. No, it's not on any of the blogrolls. I am the self-Suarez of bleggalgazers.








AFTER LIGHGHT

Tom Thompson

Look, I’ve already ruined it
or it’s ruined me.
The dawn I see by doesn’t need me
like I need it
and any extra letters it brings.

What we call mountains
is a deep violet strip
narrowly rising and falling over the green.
You might call them clouds
and be right

or hand me something crisp
call it money or flowers
and set it alight.

A Moment of Intrusion

Another place lamely explains this post better than this post lamely explains itself. Hiatus bluff of a different sort than the normal hiatus bluff - this is not a bleggalgaze - but probably just as empty.








56 (from 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE)

Julie Carr

I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
          (Dostoevsky)
Actually, he, Alexander, was innocent. Wasn't he? (Acker)
We know he was made, like all of us, from a moment of sexual intention.
I want a horse, but I am a horse.
Or intrusion. A moment of intrusion.
I am a sick man. A spiteful man.
"Where have you been, sister?" "Killing swine." (Macbeth)

A man and his family are driving to a vacation spot. Once a write, now an insurance broker with two kids in the back, wife beside him, map open on her lap. It's hot. They stop at a gas station so the kids can pee, the wife can buy some gum. Gas up. In the gas station bathroom the man catches another man's face in the mirror. For a moment his heart pounds. Something like desire. But this passes. The man is someone he knew in college. Not possible! It is! And the grin, almost embrace. How are you? What are you doing? Etc. The man walks his friend to the car, introduces him to his wife and kids. The kids take little notice. The wife smiles, but seems impatient. It is decided the man will follow along in his car, will join the family for dinner when they arrive at their destination. During the three-hour's drive, the first man tells his wife all about this friend: antics, parties. Why, she thinks, have I never heard of this man before? As evening falls, they arrive at the hotel - old and worn-down, concrete and carpet - not far from the North Carolina coastline. Dump their bags in the room, kids jump beds, they head down to the restaurant where the friend is waiting for them. He smiles and rises when they ---

Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”

A Talent for Self-Realization Will Get You Only as Far as the Vacant Lot Next to the Lumber Yard

Iannis Xenakis was born ninety-two years ago today. Play loud.

The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues. Will continue. There's one last May birthday, an apt Egoslavian High Holy Day day after tomorrow for finishing.

Persepolis one, two, three, four, five, six.

Bohor one, two.

Xenakis here before one, two, three. Can't find the rest.

The Complete Electronic Music of Iannis Xenakis.








LIFE IS A DREAM

John Ashbery

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.
My name begins with an A,
so is one of the first to be read off.
I am wondering where to stand - could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?

Before I have a chance to find out, a rodent-like
man pushes at my shoulders. "It's that way," he hisses.
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? That a photograph
of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time."

I know I'll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain thinkgs
definitely aren't it. This glove hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.