The Next Day the Microphone Was a Hummingbird

I was reacting to the reactions to Hillary Inevitability's official announcement of her POTUS 16 candidacy than to her candidacy itself. See post title, for instance. Still, this is not untrue - I agree with it. And this is true: I can't avert my eyes from the spectacle. It's like watching the same Star Trek episode for the 1097th time. I know the script - the batshit right gets batshittier, clears vast terrains on the right on the economic and imperial issues that concern our Triskelions for Clinton to occupy while Clinton goes progressive on divisive social issues to cover her left flank (and drive the batshit right batshittier), and motherfucking professional Democrats and motherfucking devout amateur Democrats will ruthlessly suppress dissent from the Left on the economic and imperial issues that concern our Triskelions. Yes, this does eliminate if not reverse the Who Is -.06% Less Shitty polarity: I could argue that those that play at less shitty to become more shitty ARE the shittinest. Yawn. Still, I can't avert my eyes. I was endoctinated that damnlessness towards American political process is a sin. I am still working on the concept that giving a damn does not require monitoring the sillyass TV show called POTUS or mandatory fandom for either the Red Sox or the Yankees. I have been relatively good, by my standards, of keeping POTUS 16 off this shitty blog, and I will try to limit here (though, from a bleggal economic and imperialistic perspective, yapping about POTUS 16 draws twice as many eyes as most posts, four times as many as slideshows of six mile hikes with Earthgirl). But POTUS 16's shittiness - it is going to be spectacular.

Also too, RIP Peter Culley, whose poetry I did not know until I read this Lisa Robertson review almost two years ago and which I still do not know as well as I should.







A LETTER TO HAMMERTOWN

Peter Culley

1.

The orange chestnut canopy has shredded
into a discarded hamper
of wet umber, umber-orange,
lacy amber, blood-orange
& bloody amber rags
through which tires carve calm channels in time,
neat stripes of a general widening
as the averages catch up.

I snobbishly note on Shasta’s behalf
the oddly spindly thighs
of her underemployed big city sisters
short-leashed
by fedora dad or leopard mom
insulting white bags
threaded through their collars
a badge of slavery–
no sniff, no FIELD, no flicker.

On the soundwalk the light
is louder than I remember,
darkest in the undertree gloom
dramatic gravel bony underfoot
until cranked across by cable car,
eighties rain filtering
through a carpentered forties porch
onto the basement suite stairwell.

Twin ghosts of my brother
pass each other at different times
& don’t look up.
wary, preoccupied, in transit.

Later I made a loop
of the pebble crunch & engine
so that they’d course
through her headphones
& make a kind of disco
that I could then loop again
& install in a top branch
under the streetlight
a kind of permanent radio.

Missing though: the persistent
sense of misdirection, the relaxation
of muscles associated
with certain vocabularies,
the slow rounding off
of matter under successive waves
of daylight & water.

The next day the microphone
was a hummingbird
extracting sugar from ink,
hovering locked sentences
breaking up in a
riot of orange lichen
& red bricks flattened under solar flares.

2.

I abandon my self
to a blushing
of precise boundaries,
like where a squirrel would
step up to snap the branch
back fast enough
to ride the torque all the way back,
a walnut under each arm–
getaway with intent to spring
rather than English leave.

It’s why I wear my
shirts backwards
& my jacket is the color
of the sky.

I’d abandon everything
for a plush spring
with a fat calendar,
every day ringing a bell
every day floating
in a penumbra of sound
echolocalic lenses unfurling
coiled batwings unflapping
as I velociraptor
among rainy streets & thread
on a knotted length of fishing line
pinpricks of orange brick
mixed with holiday sweat.
You abandon yourself
to the runnels & channels
of a new boundary,
ankle deep sliding
thick transparency mirroring
even when disrupted
the thick marine light
located by inference
the waggle of a last leaf &
two minutes of leaping edit
is a spray of divided attention,
your lupine shoulder dropping
hot science on cold water.

3.

The truckers eat on the roof
& the roofers eat in their trucks
tossing wax paper
out the window
until a cleansing thermal draft
sweeps the top of a cherry-picker,
a microbranded
cyclist smoking a Drum Blunt
squishes in half-sleep his thigh
pyjama dancing headset tuned
to the sound of a fan
or a tiny big band
but never opens his eyes not once–
an infant navigator
in a chrome helmet
racing the wax paper.

At the highest branch
of the chestnut an FM transceiver
relays sounds from the street
to another in an alder
on the shores of Beck Lake;
the chestnut is only discernible from the attic
on very quiet nights during frog
season or during storms
but the one on Beck Lake carries traffic
sounds at all times over the reeds,
only fading at the forest canopy.

4.

& in sleep
the furious forest
reconstitutes itself
the ringing silence
thick fleshly endrenched
footfall & Shasta’s fast footfall
lakeside endorsement
underalder endorsement
ringing antennae of sleep
along the long hillsides
always stumbling & climbing
gravity heavy feet prescient sleep
sleep coming to each limb
separately heaving
the will forward fall asleep
walk & fall asleep
along the long lakesides.

Run & drift awake
the stubble of vocabulary
swirls around your feet
in spouts of antique bliss
the furious forest
now suffused with a pink x-ray light
under which the bones
of the street are revealed in
arched & baroque forms
ringing byzantine brass
through coloratura speakers
interrupts the operations of sleep
along the long avenues
always always climbing
the will forward will fall asleep
& run & drift awake
along the long lakesides.

5.

Doesn’t everyone need a stapler
to bind with fallen leaves
their lists of unassailable demands?

A scotchtape splice
to return dead voices
to the brink of audibility?

A stubborn hippie structure
a  bottom heavy grid
a moving sidewalk portrait?

On the second soundwalk
the streetcorners bulged
with cartoon furniture
& clouds of silent winter gnats
swirled around the ducts & fans
I’d closed my eyes against
the expected unexpected birds
who kicked the waterjug downwind
stuck firecrackers in the gravel
held electric toothbrushes
against lampposts
the expected unexpected
tricolor of bad country fireworks
strobing raccoon morse code
through the left-open gate.

Better though to lay down on the curb
ears pressed hard against it
like GC used to
to catch those long lonely city tones,
through the headlamp glow
instructions were just
ghosts in purple offices anyhow.

Klondike? Do you hear what he
called me? Aren’t you
going to fight him?
Put together drunk, grinning
at her favorite brown thing
who’s mock desperately dialing a cab
on the unmanned cash machine
her filled in diastema
sinking through cookie
to cold whiteness
The other ones are called gaps…
  
An interval then
diastem
as you step through
this rip of surface tension
into another world–

& just as my father
carried a pint for his father
home from the pub
covering it with his hands
from the rain
I will carry this bucket
of cinammon schnaps
back from Kingsgate Mall
& not spill a drop.

Gratuitous Reaction to the Reactions to Hillary Inevitability's POTUS 16 Announcement

Baseball week one, first Yankees - Red Sox series, all nineteen games broadcast nationally, Fucking Stones v Insufferable Beatles, two for Tuesday blocks, three for Thursday blocks, but first, here's Credence. Some putz hates acronym POTUS, says a nine-letter acronym better. SHITSMEAR? So Hillary Inevitability Totally Sucks, Motherfucker, Eat a Republican?

But the Fantasy Makes It Ours, a Kind of Fence-Sitting Raised to the Level of an Esthetic Ideal

   
This Scott Walker + Sunn0))) album is my favorite of the past few months.

Saw this last night:

Voting for Hillary matters if you care about who the next SCOTUS appointees are. It matters a lot.

It's the first plea to SCOTUS extortion in Hillary's name for POTUS 16 I've seen. Expect more. Lots more. Saturation more. It was used in support of Obama during POTUS 08 and POTUS 12. Obama has yet the chance to nominate a justice except like for like, he hasn't the chance at a swing vote yet. During POTUS 12, early on, I wished for John Roberts to be hit by a bus early summer 2012 to force Obama to nominate Roberts' replacement and name a new Chief Justice at the height of Obama's reelection campaign - to challenge the assertion that the crucial reason for supporting Obama is and was SCOTUS. Because it still can be: please Baal, any time between now and November 2016 but please please please Baal, in March 2016, when Hillary Inevitability is the nominee, may John Roberts be hit by a bus so this hypothesis be tested once and for all.

 

• For the record, I would be delighted to be wrong re: the person I think Obama/Hillary/professional Democrats would nominate, but I bet pints the nominee would be adamantly pro-Triskelion.
• A voice from Troy. On Gaza.
• Ishiguro's new novel is fantasy set in medieval England? For the reader, though, the language and the appearance of the kinds of creature more usually associated with the fantasy genre is something of a shock. Ishiguro is moderately sympathetic, although to him, of course, it makes perfect sense. “I often don’t appreciate the extent to which it might be a surprise,” he concedes. “I’ve come at it from the inside. What you see at the end is my arrival point. I’ve got there with what to me are fairly logical steps, but if you encounter it cold you think, ‘God, this is odd.’ This is quite a departure.” I'm game.
• Ishiguro's new novel: Mr. Ishiguro still seems slightly anxious about how the book will be received. It could be embraced as brilliant and groundbreaking, or it could be a spectacular flop if readers balk at his full-on excursion into fantasy... “As a longtime Ishiguro reader, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, and I got it,” Lev Grossman, the fantasy novelist and book critic, said of “The Buried Giant.” “A misty Arthurian epic is just about the last thing I would have seen coming.” Some fans view “The Buried Giant” as a leap not just for Mr. Ishiguro, but also for fantasy literature as a whole. David Mitchell, author of “Cloud Atlas,” said in an email that if he was “forced at knife point” to name his favorite Ishiguro novel, he would choose “The Buried Giant” for the way it uses fantasy tropes to explore questions about love and mortality. I'm game.
• The Unconsoled reconsidered.
• My bigotry: everything in a book cover to keep me from reading the novel.
• Science fiction, "characters," and individualism.
• Armantrout.

SOONEST MENDED

John Ashbery

Barely tolerated, living on the margin

In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued   

On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso

Before it was time to start all over again.

There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils,   

And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering

The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting

The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution.   

And then there always came a time when

Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile

Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K.,   

Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused   

About how to receive this latest piece of information.   

Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out   

For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind

With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),

Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid?   

To reduce all this to a small variant,

To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau—

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.   

Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,

A moment and it is gone. And no longer

May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.   

Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.   

Now there is no question even of that, but only

Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off,   

With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across   

The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away

And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash

Against the sweet faces of the others, something like:   

This is what you wanted to hear, so why

Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers   

It is true, but underneath the talk lies

The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose

Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

These then were some hazards of the course,

Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else   

It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,   

The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.   

They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game   

Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes

And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

Night after night this message returns, repeated

In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us,   

Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth,   

The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them,   

Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes   

To be without, alone and desperate.

But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting

Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years,   

Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,   

But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression

Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day   

When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering   

Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning   

Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that

Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,   

That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint

None of us ever graduates from college,

For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up   

Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

And you see, both of us were right, though nothing

Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars

Of our conforming to the rules and living

Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us,   

Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept

The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out,

For this is action, this not being sure, this careless

Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow,

Making ready to forget, and always coming back

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Certainly Love Has Commerce with Vermin, but It Is a Friendly Partnership, Not a League of Discord

I don't think anyone holds me to the promises I make here except me (I don't think anyone pays any attention to the promises I make here except me), but I promised a Dischord cascade a couple of weeks ago, I didn't forget, I got pushed in different directions, here it is.

• I also promise myself I'll post on days I know are the least busy days in Blegsylvania, so here this is.
• Focus: There is much more to discuss in the architecture of fear; the poetics of space that Bachelard didn’t realize I don’t think. Perhaps its more the de-poeticizing of space. But that is, I trust, next post. For now, there are clearly tendencies at work in how public space is being militarized. The city as war zone. The gated rich at at command headquaters, where foot soldiers guard the aristocracy. Class segregation is an open concept, now, and increasingly expressed nonchalantly. Narrative must find resistance through new strategies that will express the clarity, for the low grade resolution of CCTV image is reflected in the blurred babblings of much of what passes for journalism and thinking today. The language of piercing limpid transparancy is ever harder to find. A lack of focus, in thought, in architecture, in narrative. The CCTV age.
• Ceravolo, moneylenders, Super Bowl 48.
• The rejection of shame.
• Mr Charlie meets Mr Chomsky.
• Martin O'Malley says Fuck Your Hillarian Inevitability. The governor of my state is a funny man.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• The activity of writing.
• Milosz's Incantation.

WORMS AND US

Rachel Wetzsteon

Maggots in the food, maggots in the floorboards,

maggots in the recurring nightmare in which,

lying down with a rugged adonis,

I wake to find him almost nibbled away.

Certainly signs of death are everywhere,

but love is more than combat with worms

and cannot be so glibly explained away;

I do not tremble or knock my knees

to keep the maggots slumbering below ground,

or crush them underfoot by flocking to

everything they are not: raucous gatherings,

stolen kisses. On the contrary,

I come away from parties adoring

what is wormlike in them: the unrisen soufflé,

the precocious boy’s octogenarian sayings,

the drooping lids of the hostess, someone’s

death rattle of a laugh. Certainly love has

commerce with vermin, but it is a friendly

partnership, not a league of discord;

a hacking cough gives proof of a full life,

a passing stranger seems all the stronger

when one foot is sinking quietly into the grave.

    II.

But is is this lingering horror of dust

that makes me pull us out of the cold earth

any way I know how: because I strive

for heaven in little rooms, visit you

in order to suck your blood, then spread it

over pipes and daffodils, and shove you

up to the vacant sky, where you hover

like a stone-cold, tedious statue who never dies,

you, poor pawn, are a jack-in-the-box gone haywire,

and I am a grinning humanist with bad dreams.

He Will Not Remember the Names of Cousins and Uncles

Here's the SunnO))) cascade I promised. Reiteration of duh. I have moved to the next stage of my obamapostasy: I can't imagine myself neener-neenering emotionally devastated Hillarmy's (go register Hillarmy.every extension at GoDaddy, I name it and relinquish claims on trademark, yo) moral outrage over the Democracy-threatening secrecy of the Christie administration. I read Jennifer Rubin for the same reason I watch natural disaster porn, here is her sloppiest, laziest, no doubt she thinks her most brilliant trolling on wapoblog ever since the last until the next. Yes, more politics today than recently. I'm going to a wedding in Norfolk this weekend, a cousin I wouldn't recognize if introduced but a son of my favorite aunt and uncle, want to bleed any excess aargh-fluid out of the political spleen just in case Earthgirl and I decide to get shit-faced and politics, as they inevitably will among the shit-faced, come up. For I swear I am keeping my mouth shut regardless. SeatSix can vouch I succeeded or failed next Sunday or Monday.

• The state versus John: Last week I had the unusual experience of being cross-examined at length by the State on the content of many of my blog posts here, in the course of a post-conviction proceeding. Although this line of questioning was objected to on grounds of relevance, it was not unexpected, and the State justified its inquisition on the grounds that my “credibility” was at issue. It was gratifying to know that at least one person was still reading this blog. And it would not surprise me if in the near future other authorities take an interest as well, as a result of this prosecutor’s interest. I think I explained myself, for the record, as well as could be expected in that format and environment, and as well as Heresy is ever able to justify itself to Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this is as good a time and opportunity as any to summarize the views I’ve expressed here over the last few years, which have evolved some but not much since the last time I posted.
• Event Planner.
• Obscure Sound's Best of November, with sound.
• Bodah reads another Hejinian poem on his weekly radio show.
• E-Literacy and the Social: It often seems that autopoiesis and self-reference play a crucial role in the basic understanding of e-literature, which the established scholarship (e.g. e-literary criticism) considers first and foremost in terms of its new media specificity. This practice is distinctly contextualized and embedded in contemporary society and its paradigm shifts. In the present time, defined by capitalism, which does not leave anything outside of its influence, there is also no point in leaving the e-literary text outside, i.e. without any references to "the social" and to theories that deal with new social and cultural paradigms. The challenge of broader social theory application in this field is therefore the current topic of interest in this essay. To emphasize the specificity of an e-literary piece (as a performance, event, procedure, program, ride, textual instrument) directs us to its materiality, which is a very historical, changeable category. The requirements for full autonomy of this field as separated from the social (the claim of modernist aesthetics), have passed. Today we recognize that software is also a cultural and social tool (Galloway, 2012). In this essay, we are going to discuss some key theoretical notions on the issue of  "the social" at the present time and their application in the field of e-literature.
• The most horrifying sentence you'll read today.
• Three new Ashbery poems.
• Flowers of Abeyance.

GRADATIONS OF BLUE

Matthea Harvey

The scent of pig is faint tonight

as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue,

looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard

with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten.

Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed

I was still soft-fingered when I planted you.

In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds,

pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests

on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun.

Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo,

like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches,

found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole,   

or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose

just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides

flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway

a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun—

a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum

on their backs—begins to reassemble memories;

the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost,

so that years later, looking at an old photograph,

she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles

but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.

("Mere Protocol"? - More Like a Second Backbone!)

• Holyfuck, listen to my new obsession. 
• Aesthetics, morality, politics, and disaster.
• The Kafkaesque world of data mining.
• Auto-pilot! 
• Sirota brings the duh.
• Hillarian inevitability: campaign against Obama's legacy from the right. Of course. And with that I hearby proclaim I suspend the use of the terms Hillarian inevitably, motherfucking Clinton, and motherfucking Clintons (which means they won't be mentioned at all) from this blog NOT because those terms aren't completely valid but because they are (though I allow myself this one last Fuck the Clintons, the two of them the perfect symbol for all that's fucked in American politics).
• Should be easy until 2016, then, probably not so much, though there's an obvious way to guarantee there's not talk of them in 2016 on this blog, executed on my end.

• Reminder (to me): field-recordings, music, poems, aargh-free links if links at all, one weekend post, tomorrow.
• BRT!
• CCT!
• Did you know new water-heaters cost $2600? It's true!
• Wolfson's has closed! (h/t SeatSix). I mean, it's been years since I was inside, but there's always been a Wolfson's on Diamond Avenue.
• Scharpling's show on Tuesday night's on WFMU never worked for me - I don't want to hear talk on the radio - but news of his retiring Best Show is noteworthy if for no other reason that it, by far, raised the most money during marathons.
• Fabio played an hour-and-a-half tribute to Lou Reed yesterday, but listen to the show for the two Meredith Monk pieces.
• Fifteen problems.
• Sebald, for those of you who do. I confess I have not felt compelled to pick up another since finishing Austerlitz, though that's more a matter of enthusiasm for other stuff than never-minding Sebald.
• Joyce Carol Oates v Robert Frost.
• Auden and ecopoetry.
• In Evidence: 3.
• New Eno interview.

INTELLIGENCE

Tom Sleigh

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed

bugs and mikes,

                           intercepted letters

full of passionate declarations, contradictory

intelligence—

                           how attached he’d grown

to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging

the influx of intelligence

with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost

                           like love: he felt

the cool gray eyes of his superiors

trained on him, rebuking him

                           for swerving, for letting

himself go—such tender obsession

occasioned by the file!

                           Not quite the professional style

he or the Agency expected…

But such official loyalties

                           seemed mere protocol to this!—

what was wrong with him,

                           he wondered, that he construed

the documents to make the subject

seem a hero,

                           a bastard whose sole patrimony

was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword

left by an unknown father beneath a stone?

And yet his exploits in the tabloids,

the headlines screaming,

SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!

HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC

                           were these heroic

different in kind from the rumors,

unverified,

                           of a rape, a murder?

—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!

To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…

On balance, for such a life,

                           the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:

think of the opportunities for evil

                           a man of such qualities must have had!

How well he knew him—an essential innocence

that followed impulse, blind

to protocol, not noticeably more kind

                           than he was cruel.

But to stamp Case Closed and cease

                           gathering intelligence,

to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,

like a lover…:

                           such limits the hero

unknowingly transgressed!

And the Agency, cold-blooded where

                           limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—

more like a second backbone!), committed

                           to keeping order, could not afford

such sentiments—the Chief of Security

felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence

                           should lead to this…

He leaned back in his chair and sighed:

                           a forged genealogy certifying

that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual

assistance pact

                           to aid in taking back the usurped crown:

he could see them now, the wind

blowing lightly, the two of them sweating

as they climbed the cliff, discussing

                           the terms, exchanging information,

intelligence—

                           how would his own face look

staring down across the sea

                           as he gestured earnestly toward

some island, saying,

                           “According to our sources,

the tax revenues…”

                           And then, edging

the hero closer to the cliff, pointing

                           out the harbor, he’d push.

but she still looked good to me, she still looked good, and all thanks to an ugly horse who wrote this poem

         
I learned that while I am still addicted to telling anyone willing to read what I think I think if I'm not less addicted I'm at least more interested in exploring the improbability of ceasing to daily disingenuously bemoan that addiction and take steps towards actively shutting the fuck up about the addiction, I said at Thursday Night Pints at questions of What the fuck was with the static? Lamest fucking post ever, said L, all agreed. Most of the evening's talk, as always, can't/don't/won't be mentioned here. Most of what I want to talk about, I in fact said, I can't/don't/won't onblog. And then we talked about the things I can't/don't/won't blog about and things K and L wanted to talk about. K said, my sister's husband has a blog he only allows invitees to read, you could do that. That's lame and cowardly, I said. L said, that's like the family letter your uncle mails with the Christmas card that details the year of his immediate family. Walter, I said. Walter who? asked K. The Walter who gets mentioned in three sentences in Friday's post.

   

• Fine metaphors abound: Atrios links to Pierce who slams Sullivan re: Hillarian Inevitability. This is why, K, I resort to links rather than re-paraphrase for xillionth time, I said. And that was your Clusterfuck Link of the Day. I really am tired of fishing for clusterfuck links as if amassing them changes or reaffirms anyone's mind (including if not mostly mine) more than (none) just one. The concept is still in R&D, this a test balloon, yes?
• Rhetorical question, that. Day by day.
• Dissent, disappointment, and draconian rule.
• So much for that balloon.
• When schools become dead zones of imagination.
• Bleggalgazing a tenth birthday. Happies!
• This week in water.
• Aimless and contemplative.
• The books we've lost.
• Because.
• 100 reasons Baltimore is better than DC.
• Lord & Taylors versue White Flint Mall.
• Scott's Run WV, circa 1930s. I feel asleep sometime the past week thinking about Felix Grant and his evening jazz show on WMAL when I was a kid, how one of the ads, almost every ad-break, was in support of the Rural Electrification Act.
• A new phenomenology? Object>subject>subject>object>fuck me.
• How to read philosophy.
• Why don't people want to read eBooks on tablets?
• Bukowski was born 93 years ago today. Not so much anymore, but 30 years ago his novels and poems influenced how I read and write.

a 340 dollar horse and a 100 dollar whore

Charles Bukowski

don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me

at the racetrack any day half drunk

betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,

but let me tell you, there are some women there

who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you

look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores

you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke

dealing out so much breast and ass and the way

it’s all hung together, you look and you look and

you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women

and then there is something else that wants to make you

tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven

across the back of the john; anyhow, the season

was dragging and the big boys were getting busted,

all the non-pros, the producers, the cameraman,

the pushers of Mary, the fur salesman, the owners

themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day:

a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close;

he ran with his head down and was mean and ugly

and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him.

the driver broke him wide

took him out by the fence where he’d be alone

even if he had to travel four times as far,

and that’s the way he went it

all the way by the outer fence

traveling two miles in one

and he won like he was mad as hell

and he wasn’t even tired,

and the biggest blonde of all

all ass and breast, hardly anything else

went to the payoff window with me.

that night I couldn’t destroy her

although the springs shot sparks

and they pounded on the walls.

later she sat there in her slip

drinking Old Grandad

and she said

what’s a guy like you doing

living in a dump like this?

and I said

I’m a poet

and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed.

you? you . . . a poet?

I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right.

but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,

and all thanks to an ugly horse

who wrote this poem.

Sedentary Intellectuals Raised in the Bosom of the Bourgeoisie Can Also Learn to Work

This commercial, I saw it on TV sometime midday yesterday, I can't stop thinking about it. I admit I don't see a lot of commercials and don't pay attention to many after two seconds, but this one I've been unpacking since I saw it and the more I unpack the more I see needs unpacking. Since the youtube might die soon or never, here, for future late tuner-inners: the Pillsbury Doughboy, his turn in front of a long line of aggrieved travelers to pass through TSA screening, giggles in delight when fingered by a fat white middle-aged TSA agent. How happy are people who switch to GEICO? asshole with the guitar asks asshole with the mandolin, answer being people fingered by TSA agents. And I'm such a whack I think, there are no accidents round here, whether deliberate or, more likely and frighteningly, not, so seamless is the overlap it's not even considered by the applicators.
  

• That was requested by Randal.
• Remote control.
• Jesus Christ on a goddamn drone.
• Capitalism.
• Capitalism.
• Fear as constant companion.
• How important to be validated by capitalism? I confess, this is a tap-root of my bleggalgazing.
• Hillarian inevitability.
• Hamster warns me to stay away from the Statue of Liberty. No problem.
• New Inquiry's generous Sunday linkages.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• I didn't see Columbus 3, United 0 though Goff makes it sound United was more competitive than score indicates, but: new ownership hoped to steal a positive year on the cheap until stadium situation is resolved, and that's a valid business decision I suppose, but PLEASE DON'T TELL ME LOSING JOHN THORRINGTON AND LEWIS NEAL IS WHY THIS TEAM SUCKS, THIS TEAM SUCKS BECAUSE JOHN THORRINGTON AND LEWIS NEAL WERE YOUR FIRST TEAM CHOICES!
• Not just a punctuation mark anymore.
• Magnificent Octopus is today's addition to Newest Gag.
• Elm.
• Someone else who uses lameass Star Trek allusions.
• Shoot me.
• Beethoven listens.
• Holyfuck, this song:

REVOLUTIONARIES, 1929

Adam Kirsch

Twelve years on, the beard that Lenin wore

Still sharpens revolutionary chins

To dagger-points held ready for the war

In which the outgunned proletarians

Will triumph thanks to these, their generals,

Whose rounded shoulders and round glasses say

That sedentary intellectuals

Raised in the bosom of the bourgeoisie

Can also learn to work — if not with hands,

Then with the liberated consciousness

That shrinks from nothing since it understands

What’s coming has to come. The monuments

To which the future genuflects will bear

These faces, so intelligently stern,

Under whose revolutionary stare

Everything that is burnable must burn.

How You Spear It, How You Sheer It, How You Flense It, How You Grind It, How You Get It to Look So Strangely Relaxed

• The Saudi marathon man.
• I had drinks after work with a former professor who's retiring after this semester, I've mentioned him before, he does American political science in the Robert Putnam/Chris Lasch style, he said, if the bomber turns out to be Muslim, imagine the advantage Obama will take to grab even more power, kill even more people. This from a guy who when I'd say the like two years ago would laugh and call me a spastic reactive cynic. Obama will take advantage, I said, if the bomber turns out to be McVeigh Jr. True, my former professor sighed.
• We then made fun of the                 asshats in the                          and the fascist assclowns, both                            , in the                             . Good times!
• UPDATE! Standard Worrier and pressed-into-duty Newby Worrier asked me to erase and gap the above bullet. Jeebus.
• The State loves photography until it hates photography.
• Obama admits he's a terrorist.
• Dear Froomkin, it's not terror and overreaction and hate, it's WONDERFUL FUN THAT GIVES LIFE MEANING and overreaction and glorious glorious hate.
• Biohazard.
• Consumerism and the industrial routine.
• This Nate Silver article reminds me that when he's predicting a Republican will win POTUS 16 all Silver's former lovers will eviscerate him.
• Strangers and hermits.
• Zizek's tribute to Thatcher.

• Nyamakalaw.
• Buying locally grown food in MOCO!
• Clarksburg! upscale outlet mall!
• Sandy Spring!
• White hands.
• As I type this sentence at 9:37 EDT 4/17/13 Google is reminding the world who's boss, bitches and bastards.
• Dostoyevsky writes his wife.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Translating a poem as telephone game.
• Elliott Carter compilation.
• Mining the audio motherlode.

BY CHANCE THE CYCLADIC PEOPLE

Anne Carson

9.4. They put stones in their eye sockets. Upper-class people put precious stones.

16.2. Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness.

8.0. Not sleeping made the Cycladic people gradually more and more brittle. Their legs broke off.

1.0. The Cycladic was a neolithic culture based on emmer wheat, wild barley, sheep, pigs and tuna speared from small boats.

11.4. Left hand on Tuesdays, right hand on Wednesdays.

10.1. She plied the ferryboat back and forth, island to island, navigating by means of her inner eye.

9.0. When their faces wore smooth they painted them back on with azurite and iron ore.

12.1. All this expertise just disappears when a people die out.

2.0. They wore their faces smooth with trying to sleep, they ground their lips and nipples off in the distress of pillows.

4.4. How you spear it, how you sheer it, how you flense it, how you grind it, how you get it to look so strangely relaxed.

4.0. Mirrors led the Cycladic people to think about the soul and to wish to quiet it.

1.1. The boats had up to fifty oars and small attachments at the bow for lamps. Tuna was fished at night.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.

3.3. A final theory is that you could fill the pan with water and use it as a mirror.

2.1. It was no use. They’d lost the knack. Sleep was a stranger.

14.1. There it was plunging up and down in its shallow holes.

6.1. The handbag, that artefact which freed human beings from having to eat food wherever they found it.

3.0. While staying up at night the Cycladic people invented the frying pan.

11.0. Three times a day she put the boat on autopilot and went down below to the cool silent pantry.

7.1. Abstention from grain is helpful.

9.3. Their eyes fell out.

11.3. The food was tastier that way.

11.5. This may sound to you like a mere boyish stunt.

11.1. The pantry, what a relief after the splash and glare of the helm.

4.1. To uncontrive.

6.0. To the Cycladic people is ascribed the invention of the handbag,

3.1. Quite a number of frying pans have been found by archaeologists. The frying pans are small. No one was very hungry at night.

9.1. Did I mention the marble pillows, I think I did.

2.3. This became a Cycladic proverb.

5.2. Proust liked a good jolt.

7.2. Abstention from grain is the same for men and women. You put your lungs in an extraordinary state of clear coolness.

13.0. One night there was a snowfall, solitary, absurd.

6.3. And after dinner, harps.

1.2. The Cycladic was an entirely insomniac culture.

2.2. Well, they said, these are the pies we have. It was a proverb.

4.2. My point of view is admittedly faulty. My nose is always breathing. I am worn out with breathing. I suspect you have days when you choose not to breathe at all.

14.0. That was the night she looked to her soul.

3.2. Or they may have been prestige frying pans.

9.2. They painted wonderful widow’s peaks on themselves or extra breasts.

5.1. Possibly because of his blanket refusal to listen to another person’s dreams at the breakfast table, for Proust dismissed this type of recollection as ‘mere anamnesia’.

16.1. There it lay, the foredeck in the moonlight, more silver than the sea.

9.5. Perhaps now they were glad after all that they did not sleep.

5.3. That moment when everyone sees exactly what is on the end of their fork, as William S. Burroughs said of celebrity.

15.1. See me leaving you better hang your head and cry, she liked songs like that. Honkytonk influence.

16.3. All of her leapt before her eyes.

8.1. They worried about this and kept their arms close to the body, clasping the torso right arm below left, like a cummerbund.

11.6. She thought it a good idea to silence mental conversation.

12.0. Clouds every one of them smell different, so do ocean currents. So do rocky reefs.

10.2. Her inner eye grew sharp enough to slaughter goats.

15.0. She’d been a pretty good harpist before the die-off.

6.2. So began the dinner parties.

10.0. Eventually the Cycladic people died out all except one, a ferryboat captain.

8.2. Left arm below right was considered uncouth.

7.0. To play a stringless harp requires only the thumbs.

5.0. The Cycladic people were very fond of Proust.

4.3. Is it because you don’t want the impact.

11.2. In the pantry she sat at the counter and ate with her hands.

16.0. As far as the experience of stirring is concerned, small stillness produces small stirring and great stillness great stirring.

Each Head Has Two Horns That Part as Neatly as a Boy About to Play the Piano Wets His Hair and Hopes It Stays Flat the Whole Recital

What's that song you keep singing, D asked at Thursday Night Pints, is that Fleetwood Mac? Yes, but it's the Best Coast cover in my head, it'll top tomorrow's post, I said. Cross-talk about the Mac Renaissance, then excitingly vicious gossip about Illtophay that I'll never ever ever type here. Then, are you betting pints she'll win? L asked re: Hillary/POTUS16. D, K, and L think HRC's at bet a million to win a penny odds. This in response to this week's certainly game-planned balloons and feelers and Carvellian ooze of Hillarian Inevitability (Trademark!). I said, I've always said Obama was sapper (back when I was betting pints at 4-1, 10-1, that Obama would be reelected) and would undermine the New Deal with full support of loyal Democrats then a Republican Daddy would be elected in 2016 to impose full punishment on the fucking peasants. Professional Republicans, K said, are distancing themselves from if not disavowing their old white right-wing base. Who cares, said L, wouldn't Hillary do a better job of destroying Social Security than a Republican Daddy? I'm trademarking Hillarian Inevitability in tomorrow's (meaning this) post, I said, though fuck all of us for having this conversation, it's April 4, 2013. But yes, I've begun to consider the possibility that the success of Motherfucking Obama as sapper might lead to Hillary as destroyer.




 
UPDATE: A practical utopian's guide to collapse. Advanced obamapologetics. Will relate a conversation I had just now with my obamapologist friend at Illtophay tomorrow, or not, on how his obamapostasy will never be ready in direct proportion to how close he approaches it. A bleggal overlord on attacks from firebaggers (firebaggers?) and obots. Profiting from mistakes. Obama's benign sexism?  After us will follow...? Stream (Lambchop lead guitarist) William Tyler's solo album. darkblack's Weekend Overnight. The Best Coast cover of Rhiannon reminded me of the above Januaries' song which reminded me of




   
which reminded me of




   
which reminded me of




   
which reminded me of




   
which reminds me of GbV, which is where it always starts:





THREE POEMS

Anne Carson

NOT THE FORSYTHIA
             he doesn't let the herd eat the forsythia but

knows they like to be amidst its blazing yellows. He stands they graze he watches. Ida watches. She puzzles him he puzzles himself. Her old plaid sportscoat his tendency to befriend catastrophe. She is innocent and filled with mood like a very tough experimental baby. Her drawing book open on her knees. Blackish iridescent hides shine green as sharks amid the herd. A lone white one (Io) glows like an idol and is Ida's favorite. She looks at her drawing looks back at Io sets her drawing book down on the grass. They smell she says. Why they're called musk oxen he says it's in a gland by the knee. What is? The musk. Some people hate it he says. You ever see a musk ox dip its head to touch its knee get out of the way it's going to charge but Ida is no longer listening. The oxen move slowly. They chew coarse gaps in the weeds shifting ever so slightly sideways with their great brows bent and the long fur sweeping their ankles. Each head has two horns that part as neatly as a boy about to play the piano wets his hair and hopes it stays flat for the whole recital. G faintly smiles. It's their looking down he loves the steady way they pay attention downward yet are watching everything else too. A musk ox can see 310 degrees around in a circle. Like cats he thinks. Like cats Ida says. What? Look easy to draw but it's so not true. Ah he says. I don't hate it she says but G is frowning now. His wings are rising up on his back and he wants to know why.

    THAT OLD CLICHÉ

of polar adventure fatigue flooding his body in waves. This wonderful longing to lie down surely he's been walking for years surely he should stop and rest a moment against one of those satiny planes of ice that allure on every side. Cucumbers Shackleton Spam why is everything draining away why this silver ebbing and flowing not quite reaching his brain. He is so tired. Pour the honey into the jar. He dozes. A sudden violent sneeze shatters him in all directions. Oh he says aloud let's not die in the jar and with an effort that seems to rip his spine apart arches his upper back. Stiffened wing muscles pull hard against their roots and move into a lift. Pieces of ice break from the primaries and fall in a shower. Again he strains backward and up against what seem like seams of steel thinking maybe I can't do this but all, all at once the coverts jolt terribly free and the motion begins. He is rising. Air grabs his knees. Out of black nothing into perfect expectancy – flying has always given him this sensation of hope – like glimpsing a lake through trees or that first steep velvet moment the opera curtains part – he is keening down the ice fault. Soul fresh. Wings wildawake. Front body alive in a rush of freezing air. He opens his mouth in a cry as red sadness pours away behind him and the ancient smell of ice floods every corner of his skull.


A SALMON ANSWERS Ida when G asks. Some conversations are not about what they're about. The word conversation means "turn together." Turn a salmon turn home turn Prometheus a hopeful god. Turn organize his life! Do not turn betrayal not kiss. Night bones. Day sleeper. Girl. Not stark naked not stark itself. What do you want to be in your next life. A salmon. Why. A rescue. How. A play. Whose. A reading. When. A Friday. No. Is that why they call it the Rec room.