I contemplated not honoring all four birthdays of the Great Run of BLCKDGRD Holy Days that I have every year (minus a forgetful oops or two) for more than two decades here and the prior iterations of this current shitty blog and then decided to for more than just the sake of Fuck It, which sake I'll keep mum. I may read the copy of Melville's *Redburn* I found in a Michigan used books store last month sometime in the next year though reading the first ten pages the night after I found the copy did not inspire me. I can't imagine summoning the determined concentration necessary to reread Gass' *The Tunnel* (though rereading it as the clusterfuck worsens and assholes and assholedom are celebrated as heroes and morality of the clusterfuck is probably a good idea) but I might do *Omensetter's Luck* in the next year, and I didn't binge on Kate Bush or the Grateful Dead for Jerry because I can hear any song in my head by both any time I want. I have been Hüsker Dübingeing of late
A fine metaphors abounding work email chain today:
Dear Jeff,
I
hope you are doing well! I am writing with a question and I realize you
might not be the right person - or maybe there is no right person - but
is it possible to have a course packet made up, for purchase by
students? I am assigning several texts (short stories) in PDF format and
I don't want students staring at a computer in class, so I'd like to
make a hard-copy course packet. Is this something I would talk to you
about, or someone at the bookstore? I would provide the PDFs. Thank you
very much,
Sincerely,
Susanna
Hi Susanna, the
Library hasn't done course packets for well over 25 years because of
copyright (and the department that did them doesn't exist anymore). I
don't think even FedEx will do them any longer. I'd be surprised if the
bookstore will, though it doesn't hurt to ask.
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
OK, now I feel like an absolute dinosaur. No seriously, thank you for the response. I will figure out something else!
"The threat of fascism whips the electorate into line behind austerian liberals, while the resulting social misery and anomie provides the emotional mulch for rising fascism. Both prefer it if the left is excluded from the picture"
"Ralph Shortey, the freshman Republican who introduced the legislation, acknowledges he is not aware of any company in Oklahoma or elsewhere that is attempting to sell food that contains fetuses, but he said, "There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors."
I did finish Henry James' *The Ambassadors* but only because I felt morally obligated to keep my promise to Leona and Dennis and I'll NOT be reading another James, the fucker does muddle for motherfucking muddle's sake
*Punching the Clown*, the new Lambchop album, drops in seventeen days, of the three songs released so far this one slays me most, slays me, yes I already posted it before the BLCKDGRD Holy Day posts, the album won't save me soul but it will salve is a little
Tom Clark
THE COLOR OF STEPPED ON GUM
is the color of our times. The light of our times is the light in the 14th St. subway at 2 A.M. The air of our times is the air of the Greyhound depot, Market & 6th. It is prime time. A passed out sailor sits pitched forward like a sack of laundry in a plastic bucket seat his forehead resting on the movie of the week. The Long Goodbye
Side 2, "The Ninth Wave", of *Hounds of Love,* my most listened-to side of music when albums had sides ever, gives me chills to this day, I tested. More Kate here.
Of course it was a work, whether sponsored wet work or random act of stochastic violence, a work. All the shittiest people in America are sanctimoniously wrought with maudlin performative grief at his murder and deliriously horny as fuck at their wet dreams of revenge . Here's what I wrote about it on canvas (since writing in tablets seems duhful with redundancy):
Both disconcerting and weirdly emancipating to open either working tablet, hold pencil in hand, and not be able to write what I see in my mind. Strangest days of my life, to see as clearly as I've ever and to have completely lost (at least temporarily) the means I've used my whole life to express it. There is no more kayfabe to break, is that it? Here's a first draft on that thought before I fuck it up
Sheeyit, this has been the free bingo space on my card for the past 50+ years, people can vouch
White House Insists Mephen Stiller Does Not Play with Dolls
Why Do People Choose Authoritarianism Over Democracy?
"I'd like the NYT poobahs to explain why the explicitly rightwing political murders of Democratic lawmakers Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman four months ago did not "weigh on the American Experiment" or were "an inflection point" on "what kind of nation Americans want to be."
"It really is remarkable that to properly revere Karlie Chirk, one must NOT quote him, and that to remember or publish words he said diminishes and dishonors him. He can only be properly remembered once we have excised his dishonorable statements from the public historical record"
"We are at the point in the honoring-Karlie-Chirk's-memory cycle when faculty are being fired for posting, without comment, Karlie Chirk's words. At the behest of politicians sworn to uphold the first amendment, and in public institutions covered by first amendment protections"
"There is no law against irrationality, and we all must accept with a certain stoicism that there are millions of people in this country with views that border on madness"
"I've been slowly reading Pynchon's Mason & Dixon over the last year and today I finally hit The Passage--what's clearly the key to the whole book, a little less than halfway through, right after Mason and Dixon learn about the horrors of the Paxton Boys' massacre"
Posting 50+ links, all but a few clusterfuckful, on the last Saturday of June in the middle of the Blog Days of Summer a massive Fuck Me in futility, earnestly desired and justly deserved. This is how I process, and to process more I need dump what I've processed. It's not the pings: 999 of 1000 pings I currently get are bots, dozens of bots, thousands of pings a day - I hope you're still here but I'm not scrolling the logs to see if yes and if yes who - it's readying myself for in increasingly inevitable and rapidly approaching moment when I may need to protest with more of my body than my typing fingers (though a few continually warn me my typing fingers are sufficient to get the rest of my body punished). Here, this is for the surveillance bots: yes, Kate Bush has one of two permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game and the single *Babooshka* of her brilliant third album *Never for Ever* was released 45 years ago yesterday
The Israeli genocide of Palestinians continues, yo
"Thus, the bankruptcy of the European ‘West’ was compounded, and the industrial mass murder of the Jews ‘repaired’, through an impossible political arrangement: Israel. Shlomo Sand offers the brutal summary: ‘Europe vomited us, the Jews, onto the Arabs of Palestine.’"
What Zohran Mamdani Means for the Anti-Monopoly Movement
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"Most elections are conflicts over who will run an existing system, with the candidates offering tweaks to what is essentially a stable political order. But a few elections are what I will call “system defining,” where a rising coalition, reflecting a new set of political demands, contests with an old order, seeking to re-gear the basics of how our institutions operate"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani (Motherfucking New York Democratic Senator edition)
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"Mamdani won a higher % of votes from Jewish NYers than from many other ethnic or religious demographics, won the endorsement of Lander & Nadler. It seems the bourgeois press will not stop until Jews conform to their Zionist, Islamophobic narrative. This shit is tired"
That Democrats en masse aren't screaming about masked goons refusing to show badge or give name and disappearing people to South Sudan is all you need know about Democrats, including Zohran Mamdani, who is not going to save you
"When he decided to inflict his presence on New York City again, centrist Democrats lined up to support him. Democrats who’d called for his resignation a few years earlier told voters he would be a great mayor. The logic was transparent: Give the bastard a second chance so the left doesn’t get one at all"
"Between the expulsion of Hogg and the freakout over Mamdani, it seems Dems are responding to their problem with young men by saying "fuck you, we don't need your votes." Which is really an interesting strategy. We'll see how it works out"
"one of the projects of the court is to expand the ability of states to pursue reactionary ends and constrain the ability of the federal government to set minimum standards *or* of democratic-led states to expand upon existing rights"
"Clinton made Summers his Russia viceroy overseeing Yeltsin's catastrophic neoliberal reforms—resulting in rise of Putinism. Then Obama put Summers in charge of the US economy—giving us Trumpism. Nothing is more destructive than Larry Summers' advice"
Inside The Secretive Network that Shaped the Right-Wing Media Machine
"The guy who authored the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC and opened the floodgates for infinite dark money in politics wants us all to know that "freedom is at risk." No shit Sherlock. You're the one to blame."
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