Look Up with the Rapt and Stupid Look of Saints in Paintings

To stop myself thinking about it I bought an Arches 12 x 12 hot-press watercolor block which, if I'd thought about it instead of thinking I needed to buy it, is too big for the bed of the scanner I use so I can post the squares here and there and too big for the laminator I use so that the squares can be handled without fountain pen ink staining fingers, the below is the 12 x 12 cropped to 11 x 11, fine metaphors abound

I've stopped exactly halfway through Fosse's *Septology.* I forced myself to pick it up once, not twice, I sin for not reading it end to end like I once told myself I sinned if I didn't but promise to read after I finish, laugh, McCarthy's *The Passenger,* let me say this about that, I've ordered *Stella Maris* which I'll read after I finish the second half of Fosse's *Septology.* Fosse's Asle has a dog, McCarthy's Bobby has a cat, John Cale has a new song:

Many echoes between the two novels, many probably just me reaching, shared themes, standard novel info-striptease. *The Passenger* is often funny and on two occasions so far laugh out loud funny. I'm open to it and I don't know if I hope I'm wrong or not but lay heavy odds that not *once* will I laugh out loud reading *Septology,* which I will finish though now I like the guy whose move is short verb-less sentences versus this 824 page one sentence novel, another fucking one sentence novel, now, more often than not squeezed into a single paragraph sausage if you're lucky, a too common and now irritating gimmick, it's old, motherfuckers. Old, though below is a new Yo La Tengo song

Owned! I've been owned! I had no idea!
Mike Davis's Ten Immodest Commandments
Third World War				KEVORKO 3000
White people whitewashing MLK
Imperial dominance disguised as Democratic deterrence
NATO and the long war on the 3rd World
We must separate from the burning house
White people whitewashing MLK
Jon Fosse and the art of tedium
A syntax of cadaverous dignity
Maggie's weekly links				JOHN CALE!
Why I divorced the Orioles 25 years ago
Virology as ideology				FRESH HELL
Second to last paragraph: "(PJ) Harvey will release a new studio album—her first in seven years—in 2023" so wOOt!
{ feuilleton }'s weekly					Luddite library
New Sleaford Mods song is lol good

FICTION

Howard Nemerov

The people in the elevator all
Face front, they all keep still, they all
Look up with the rapt and stupid look of saints
In paintings at the numbers that light up
By turn and turn to tell them where they are.
They are doing the dance, they are playing the game.

To get here they have gone by avenue
And street, by ordinate and abscissa, and now
By this new coordinate, up. They are three-
dimensional characters, taken from real life;
They have their fates, whether to rise or fall,
And when their numbers come up they get out.

a black dog lies in the road, panting

• Trump *will* burn the house down, our shitlords know this
• Our shitlords signaling - this could have been released in 1213, like the tax story - enough, time to consolidate gains, it's what Democratic potuses are for
• they hope he (dies) loses, the fat bastard, before he burns the house down 
• fatter, bastarder, our shitlords, golden in scotus
• Triskelion bets made if Trump burns the house down (Triskelions bets made if he doesn't)
  

NEW JOHN CALE!

• Our shitlords plan to continue destroying the habitable world
• Shitlord kabuki
• Deep Anthropocene
• O, there was a blogroll culling, many dispatched to cemeteries at blogrolls bottom, no one was deleted, I don't think anyone interred reads this shitty blog, but if yes and you're not where you once were you're still here, and as always, thanks for reading
• Motherfucking Democrats
• Gravy train
• The Pope attacks neoliberalism more than Democrats (or American Catholics)
• Pigs
• First lowering no whales die (a whale took a glancing blow of a harpoon) but gruesome upcoming
• Death the the proposed crematorium in the neighborhood I grew up in!
• William T Vollmann has lower odds to win than Krasznahorkai?
• Hey! Moco, DC, and Nova friends here, family's new baby allergic to cats and brokenhearted family needs find home for two cats, eight and nine years old, I haven't met the cats but they sound wonderful, if interested I can put you in contact, help please.
• Twelve worse MOCO parking lots
• For the exact number of times I've read Ishmael's description of his first encounter with Ahab's hired assassins I've gone back and read the chapter Elijah just like Ishmael told me too
• I *just* miss the cut again
• The experience of experience itself
• Dancing
• Old John Cale

AUDADE WITH BURNING CITY

Ocean Vuong

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

            Milkflower petals on the street

                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

            Open, he says.

                                        She opens.

                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out

            his cigarette as footsteps

                            fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

                                         your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

            unstraps his holster.

                                        His hand running the hem

of  her white dress.

                            His black eyes.

            Her black hair.

                            A single candle.

                                        Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

                                        shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

            through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                            lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

                                                                                   crushed into the shine

                                                       of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                      for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

                                facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

                                             A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

                beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

                A white ...    A white ...    I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

                                                          falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

                                           with gunfire. Red sky.

                              Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

            The city so white it is ready for ink.

                                                     The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

            something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

                        beneath them. The bed a field of ice

                                                                                 cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

                             their faces, my brothers have won the war

                                                                       and tomorrow ...    

                                             The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...    

                                                            to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...    

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

                                            runs silently toward her god — 

                           Open, he says.

                                                         She opens.

I'm Not Perfect, But You're Perfect for Me, or: Seventy-Seven Today

• I play that song every John Cale birthday, a High Egoslavian Holy Day.
• I didn't forget this morning, I'm on Eastern Shore w Earthgirl, photos and more tomorrow, or not.
• I play the below all the time, I'd guess it's between the 3rd and 6th most posted song here.
• Lots more Cale (but no VU) here.

The Railroad I Cannot Build That Gomez Blew Up

That's from 2012, thought about it re: diet and clusterfuck after 3,747th repeat of one episode of Conversation with a Hillaryite Colleague yesterday, diet because HC was shoveling Clo$ed $unday for White Je$u$ chicken nuggets into her mouth, clusterfuck while blurting at me I gotta, just gotta re-embrace motherfucking Democrats because Trump trumpier, trumpiest every goddamn day. See tags. Links tomorrow, or not.

It's a Different Kind of Love, or: Seventy-Six Today

Lots more here.

Under Our Igloo Skies the Frozen Mind Holds to One Truth

• Serendipity: it happened yesterday, but I can't name names. 
• Person A visited Poet B this past weekend, Poet B being Person A's godfather, so Poet B had been discussed just this past Monday between me and Person A's sister. Poet B taught Poet C in college. Poet C is a friend, he wrote Bridges to Build below. Yesterday on the new journal cart was the Jan/Feb 18 American Poetry Review, I grabbed it. Inside, a long article by Poet B reminiscing about poets in his life, including Poet C. I didn't know Poet B had taught Poet C until I read the article. I emailed Poet C, Have you seen this? and then scanned and emailed him the article when he said he hadn't. Poet B and Poet C have two different recollections of the past.
• Gotta stop here, right when it gets good. Serendipity is always Blessed, sometimes it is Cursed.
• UPDATE! I have the PDF btw, if you want to see the article in question ask.
• Poetics of the ungovernable.
• The seeds of revolt are present.
• Studies in power.
• Patty Chang's wandering lake.
• post-truth / new year's song.
• Bridges to Build.
• In praise of the unruly.
• Five minutes earlier the cart wouldn't have got there, five minutes later the cart would have been gone.

SESTINA d'INVORNO

Anthony Hecht

Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,

And O that we were there. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind

An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island

Was blessed heaven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.

Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.

The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives,
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.

No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.

Seventy-Five Today

Love. Love love love. High Egoslavian Holy Day. Lot's more here.







The second most air-guitared song of my life:






 
UPDATE! These by request:




     
*
 

Who Decides Against Our Teams

Mary Tyler Moore's death. I've not been moping and not posting, or didn't think I'd been moping, been successful in producing unsuccessful pages on (like always) me and faith. I'm small, I need a team. I saw a tweet Mary Tyler Moore was dead. For Liberals of my age that show was gospel. I thought of the Husker Du cover of her show's theme song, I youtube it, there's the show's theme song, click the arrow, Mary throwing her hat in the air, and it slayed me, a Eucharist of Nostalgia.

• Serendipity be Blessed.
• I also have unsuccessful pages on how my brain is being deliberately rewired. I mean, more and much more sloppily than before, and by design. It's frighteningly fascinating.
• Or I'm old and my chips don't process like they used too.
• Death to the Either/Or.
• The gags of litany still salve.
• RIP Harry Mathews who I've read like a religious obligation but but never quite got, as in dug. My fault, certainly. Just received Tlooth from off-campus storage, I have slim hope it will work this time, my never quite digging it an article of faith I need overcome.
• RIP, Mannix.

  
Cool gales shall fan the glades

Harry Mathews

But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at?

Who wants to write a poem without the letter e,

Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal

(OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn

Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u

In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,

Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by

Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat

Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up

Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e.,

Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north

Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden ship without a drop to bail,

Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad-
making!) — or fresh basil

Gently crushed by its own slight weight, reviving memories of delights once stumbled on as a boy,

Delights often wreathed with necessary pain, like the stout unforgiving thorns

That tear shirt and skin as we stretch for ripe blackberries, to be gulped down fast,

Sweeter than butter and marmalade, quenching our thirst better than sucked ice,

Making us almost drunk as we shriek with false contempt at each benighted ump

Who decides against our teams. What happened to those blissful fruits, honeydew, purple plum,

White raspberry, for stealing which from Mrs. Grossman’s stand I invented ingenious alibis

That she never believed (insulting, or what?)? Where are childhood’s innocent sweetnesses, like homemade rice

Pudding and mince pie? Or the delicious resistances of various foods — bony

Lobsters, chops with their succulent tiny interstices, corn sticking to the cob, or the grilled feast

Of brook trout I caught without too much fuss after kicking a 
resentful hornets’

Nest? And when carnality replaced appetite, I was communally pronounced the horniest

Ten-year-old around; and I hadn’t even seen you. But when I did, you became the plume

In the horse’s hat of my lust. I was thirteen when we first danced together. There weren’t many afters

But I cherish my plume. There weren’t any afters, nothing, just a gentle abseil I

Could not climb back up. I still wave my plume, or my horse does, as he canters nobly

Into next year, my eighty-fifth. I hasten to add that “this coyness, lady, were no crime”

If I didn’t, in spite of all, feel so grateful to you. All manner of mercis

Fill my throat, along with immortal memories, of which I must acknowledge the thorniest

To be your disappearance, whether you tanked in river water or were scorched by Zeus’s proximity (or some such baloney);

But your firm breasts, taut nipples, and bent thighs? No thorns. All you wanted was a loosened peplum,

So I still bear your plume, and your name will not die: not to be written here or read, but my voice shall sibilate

It so shrilly that unseeded babies hear me, and every hidden woodworm wake from its dream to fall forever from the rafters.

The Cherished Worms of My Dispassion

• Cale is 74 today. The song above and Eno/Cale song at bottom always included in Egoslavian birthday post. More songs here.
• The spectacle of disintegration.
• What Sanders Michigan win means.
• It means: Now the knives come out. 
• Posted already, but the Washington Post's assault on Bernie Sanders needs re-remarking. Watch what happens now.
• REMINDER: Sanders' appeal for me is SOLELY his ability to piss off the motherfucking Clinton Democrats.
• Fracking Clinton.
• Hillary throws unpledged super-delegate in trunk of car.
• Hillaryite colleagues: I'm not goading them for giggles NOR telling them to calm the fuck down, she's going to be the nominee.
• Millions support Trump. Here's why.
• $1M per inch. Snow removal, not Trump's....
• Seven things to know about the Purple Line.
• Denise Levertov should be more famous.
• Cale has new music. I'd comment on whether I like the new music or not but last time I did David Bowie died.

GOODBYE TO TOLERANCE

Denise Levertov

Genial poets, pink-faced   

earnest wits—

you have given the world   

some choice morsels,

gobbets of language presented

as one presents T-bone steak

and Cherries Jubilee.   

Goodbye, goodbye,

                            I don’t care

if I never taste your fine food again,   

neutral fellows, seers of every side.   

Tolerance, what crimes

are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,   

blood donors. Your crumbs

choke me, I would not want

a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped   

by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never   

falter: irresponsive

to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,

whose blood spurts out and stops

forever

because you choose to believe it is not your business.

Goodbye, goodbye,

your poems

shut their little mouths,   

your loaves grow moldy,   

a gulf has split

                     the ground between us,

and you won’t wave, you’re looking

another way.

We shan’t meet again—

unless you leap it, leaving   

behind you the cherished   

worms of your dispassion,   

your pallid ironies,

your jovial, murderous,   

wry-humored balanced judgment,

leap over, un-

balanced? ... then

how our fanatic tears

would flow and mingle   

for joy ...

Olive Bobblehead and Olive's Bobblehead

• In case you thought Earthgirl forgot Olive's grey spot between the ears.
• Here is what this snowstorm has taught me: for reading, progressive lenses are shit, my eyes hurt much less and not nearly as soon reading without glasses.
• My eyes will not let me read for more than an hour at a time. Last time I was at the eyedoc I asked if there is anything I can do to keep my eyes from hurting after a half hour (while wearing lenses at the time) reading, and he said, what are you, 60? and I said, no 56, and he laughed.
• So, surfing for me, links for you.
• Guidelines for an emergent poetics.
• Precarity (Tom, w more Ceravolo).
• #434.
• On abandoning novels.
• It could be aliens.
• The Trump Paradox: a Rough Guide for the Left.
• The Death of Capitalism.
• Why Bloomberg is considering a run.
• The consequences of speech.
• Bob Mould, for those of you who do.
• New Juliana Hatfield/Paul Westerberg!
• Here's today's poem, not typed out because, um, NEW JOHN CALE!

Seventy-Three Today

• High Egoslavian Holy Day. 
• That's right, no Velvet songs. It's not fuck the Velvets, it's Velvets, who gives a fuck. I once got, I got why I got, I don't get any more.
• I'm halfway through Nicholson Baker's Anthologist. Some of you get Baker, yes? I did like Human Smoke, but I've never mmwahed the fiction. Trying.
• And tried - for me relatively successfully - for a clusterfuck-free weekend. I liked it, sorry.
• Here, a few friends have new content:
• This week in water.
• This exhibition is closed to the public.
• Order Jacob's novel. 
• Jim Dine's letter to the troops.
• Operation Dipstick.
• Great failures of our time.
• This isn't from a friend, but I need post this article on Philip Guston, posted for Earthgirl for the painter, posted for me because of course I think of Morton Feldman. Give it all four hours, forty-eight minutes.

*



*



*



*



*



*



*



*



*

Record Breaking *Thriller* Dance Attempt

• Fabio played the above yesterday, made me think of the the Lambchop below. Fabio also played the John Cale at post's bottom.
• When I was a zealous American Liberal/Democrat - when I would, for example, stoke a silly righteous rage that an extreme rightwing racist politician from a conservative state would speak before a gathering of extreme racist rightwingers - it was Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic Convention Keynote Speech that plucked most sanctimoniously on my heart strings.
• Police: a reminder.
• MY PROMISE TO YOU: I WILL NEVER USE A GAG WHERE I TYPE POLICE AND LINK TO GORDON SUMNER'S SHITTY FUCKING POLICE. I LOVE YOU ALMOST AS MUCH AS I HATE GORDON SUMNER'S SHITTY FUCKING POLICE.
• That's not true - I do love you, but nowhere near as much as I hate The Fucking Police.
• Spectating at the end of the world.
• It was twenty years ago today.
• ill-founded.
• What do we want, really?
• Food links.
• Whatever 3.0: a bleggalgaze.
• My future hell.
• The anti-Tolkien? Anyone wanna say anything about Michael Moorcock?
• Brad's 2014 booklist.
• Notes on the Modern Poetic Image (h/t).
• Duncan's ten best posts of 2014. He mentions the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. Remember, February 1 is Blog Amnesty Day. Today's monologue is a much abridged another reminder: be Kind, fellow motherfuckers. And many of you have been to me of late. Thanks.
• Pere Ubu: in Italia. 

PARAGRAPH

Rae Armantrout

Record breaking Thriller

dance attempt.

                *

Wolfman Jack style

dj in the video game says,

“This is Wasteland Radio

and we’re here for you”

                *

You are here

maintaining détente

between the voices

in your head.

Immediacy is retro,

says Lytle.

                 *

Nostalgic/futuristic

scene in which

we can read the code—

green

flowing algorithms.

We can almost

slip right in.

We Stopped for Corn, Just Picked, and Plums and Kale

I hadn't looked ahead on the birthday schedule when I posted a John Cale cascade this past Monday. Lucky you, lucky me. He's seventy-two today. Here's one of my ten most air-guitared songs ever:

• There goes the dream of 102 points. I took my camera, took three shots. The point of renewing my DC United season tickets for this season was to be sure my waning fandom wasn't over-affected by United's suckage last season. When driving to the stadium last night the excitement wasn't there, when I walked around the stadium before the game the excitement wasn't there, before the kickoff the excitement wasn't there. It is both a blessing and a curse to be reassured it's not United's suckage on the field that's primary cause for my ever decreasing damn. Will give it the season - and United might turn out not to suck so much, though it will take firing St Benny, who might not make it until April, to make that happen - but....
• The Swarmachine, part one.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links. 
• The Battle of White Flint!
• Earthgirl and Ilse must have been fourth and fifth.
• On Teju Cole's assertion the novel is overrated.
• What to eat, what to drink, what to leave for poison. 
• Mr Alarum and his band Queen Wolf interviewed on radio tonight! Listen in while Alex says nothing! and his bandmates yap wittily!
• More Robert Ashley.

DRIVING TO CAMP LEND-A-HAND

Berwyn Moore

The day we picked our daughter up from camp,   

goldenrod lined the road, towheaded scouts   

bowing on both sides, the parting of macadam   

as we drove, the fields dry, the sky lacy with clouds.   

A farmer waved.  A horse shrugged its haughty head.   

We stopped for corn, just picked, and plums and kale,   

sampled pies, still warm, and tarts and honeyed bread.   

Sheets on a line ballooned out like a ship’s sail.   

Time stopped in those miles before we saw her.   

For eight days we hadn’t tucked her in or brushed   

her hair or watched her grow, the week a busy blur   

of grown-up bliss.  It came anyway, that uprush   

of fear—because somewhere a child was dead:   

at a market, a subway, a school, in a lunatic’s bed.