We Dry and Die in the Sun While the Seascape Arranges Old Fruit

Yes, this thing is still on. Every late August I apologize here for lack of content, it's the end of the Blog Days of Summer, I'm in the middle of the three busiest, hardest weeks of my work year and between lack of time and drained damn I don't type here, and every late August is occurs to free-agent agnostic me that the only two proofs of Gods I can offer is that I, who always has music on and obsesses over music, have the worse singing voice Gods gave to humans, and that my birthday, for the 36th year in a row, falls on one of the shittiest days of my work year



Someone twaated a photo from the DNC of a statement by King Gizz in support of the Democratic ticket and for a brief moment I felt ever-so-slight warmth for my long-divorced-from team, but then someone twaated Elizabeth Warren making a vance couch joke which got fools in stupidass glittery-blue comboy hats ecstatic with laughter and ick, so icky, so-much for the ever-so-slight warmth for my long-divorced-from team. Is Joe's genocide still on-going? In any case, I'm reminded:

Yes, Republicans are weird but Democrats & shitlibs are freaking creepy, yo
The Illegitimacy of Both Israel and the Two-State Solution
"Look at how central the Hamas “sexual violence” scam is here to Democrats’ efforts to justify their continued support for Israeli mass murder"
Dire Warnings As Israel's Fascists Have Taken Over The Rein
Killing Their Way to Peace					Enshittification
Meta permanently bans The Cradle in latest attack on free speech
US universities impose rules to avoid repeat of Gaza protests
Politicians In Dystopialand Warn Other Candidate Will Cause Dystopia
Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia
The People’s Court of New Normal Germany (Part Three)
Catastrophe Bonds				British pogromism
The government’s efforts to regulate hactivists out of existence
Public Ownership of Public Goods
Maggie's		Beloved Alexa Alarum checks-in
THOUGHTS he HAD WHILE WORKING ON BiGGER THOUGHTS
An Ode to Old Bay, the Great American Condiment
ɔhɔfuɡul		the poetry of our existence			{ feuilleton }
When Emily Dickenson mailed it in
"Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral entropy"
Reissue of the Week: Throbbing Gristle’s The Third Mind Movements

THE BEACH IN AUGUST

Weldon Kees

The day the fat woman

In the bright blue bathing suit

Walked into the water and died,

I thought about the human

Condition. Pieces of old fruit

Came in and were left by the tide.

What I thought about the human

Condition was this: old fruit

Comes in and is left, and dries

In the sun. Another fat woman

In a dull green bathing suit

Dives into the water and dies.

The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.

We dry and die in the sun

While the seascape arranges old fruit,

Coming in and the tide, glistening

At noon. A woman, moderately stout,

In a nondescript bathing suit,

Swims to a pier. A tall woman

Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human

Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.

Apoplectic Executioners, Bungled Incisions

I wrote in tablet last night at 5pm: For the second year in a row Joe Biden's motorcade has shut down the Beltway at rush hour so he can attend a fundraising event at Bethesda Shitlord Country Club. and then at 8pm yesterday evening I saw on twaater Chuck Schumer saying Latin American immigrants need treated "within Democratic principles" and twaated back: "Democratic principles means Gazan children having limbs amputated with no anesthesia from bombing fully funded and supported through our genocidal Mideast colony and its zionist zealots," I'm seething, thanks for asking

The Artist Giving the Finger: to be honest, like everything I make, from paintings to parked disc ups for a rare birdie putt to human relationships, I depend entirely on coincidence which occasionally morphs into serendipity: the finger found me, I did not find the finger

Among my most biting apostasies my discovery that I don't find solace in seething I once did which must mean the seething that soothed when I was younger must not have been genuine but performative seething and that the seething I don't find that solace in now will also appear performative to me tomorrow. Waah

I haven't typed this in this space in years, at first by design and then by dotage: I (and my cohort of last round of baby-boomers) am the trajectory of America from rise to peak and then now bitter enfeeblement and fatal decline. Do you know I once thought I'd enjoy seething unto empire's death and that I don't, beyond my guilt of the world my generation is leaving to my daughter, my angriest, most deservedly bitter apostasy

At the blue place (I've a fuckton of invites if you want one) I subheaded the site this site's old subhead, Canary, Weathervane, Cassandra, Fool. I can't stop seething it needs said before I assert I don't want to, though I need seethe better, not more effectively (since I seethe to no effect at all) but seethe with more focus, with less spillage into those pockets of my life that I poison with seething's corrosive side-effects. My posting less of late here an attempt to concentrate my seething into bursts rather than blurts, for all the good it's done me. Yes, this is a bleggalgaze, my apologies. Here's this shitty blog's Angry Song, Fleabus on drums and guitar, Stanley vocals

BLOOD MONEY: THE TOP TEN POLITICIANS TAKING THE MOST ISRAEL LOBBY CASH
The Long War on Gaza:
⇧	"The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time. In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves"
	"Violence in Gaza has not only or even primarily been a military matter, as it is now. It has been a matter of everyday, ordinary acts: the struggle to access water and electricity, feed one’s children, find a job, get to school safely, reach a hospital, even bury a loved one. For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil, among other factors—has become a permanent condition."
Going Mask-Off About The Two-State Solution Lie
Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.
"When Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the assault on Gaza as a war “to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization,” he wasn’t really lying. He was telling the truth — just maybe not quite in the way that he meant it"
HOW AMERICAN LIBERALISM ENABLES PALESTINIAN GENOCIDE IN REAL TIME
Impolite society			Global Inequality Network
Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
In 2024, newsrooms will be under intense internal pressure to defend democracy?
EXTINCT WOOLLY DOGS!
UNDERGROUND ZOMBIE STREAMS!
Hoo Boy Comes The Wonderful Life
Suspending the Apparatus of Glory
Bleggalgaze: not mine					The death of helmetball?
Maggie's weekly				{ feuilleton }'s weekly
IF BERLIN (poems) if berlin (poems)
Julia Kristeva: Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death or Language Haunted by Sex
What I am giving my daughter for giftmas

EIGHT VARIATIONS

Weldon Kees

1.

         Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,

         But that was quite some time ago.

         Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,

         Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.

         Moving through ivy in the park

         Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate;

         But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone.

         The path is strewn with papers to the street.

         Numbers that once were various

         Regarded us, were thought significant, significant

         Enough to bring reporters to the scene.

         But now the bell strikes one, strikes one,

         Strikes one—monotonous and tired.

         Or clicks like a sad valise.

    2. Note to Be Left on the Table

    This ghost of yours, padding about the upper halls,

    Given to fright-wigs Burbage might have worn,

    Moaning in doorways, jumping out at maids,

    Has not convinced me even yet. Can this be you?

    Your life was frightening enough, but this

    Poor pallid counterpart who fuddles in its role

    Is inexcusable. Go haunt the houses of the girls

    You once infected, or the men who bore

    Your company far oftener than I; annoy the others

    For a change. Is this, my house, the medieval hell

    You took to at the grave’s edge, years ago,

    After a dozen other hells had burned themselves away,

    Or are we purgatory here? If not,

    You make it one. I give you until noon.

3.

Ruined travelers in sad trousseaux

Roost on my doorstep, indolent and worn.

Not one of them fulfills despised Rousseau’s

Predictions. Perhaps they are waiting to be born.

If so, the spot’s been badly chosen.

This is a site for posthumous investigations,

Pillows stuffed with nettles, charnal notions:

Apoplectic executioners, bungled incisions.

Indeed, our solitary midwife fondles the hemlock.

We welcomed one poor hackneyed Christ,

Sad bastard, croaking of pestilence. The basement

Holds him now. He has not as yet arisen.

The tickets are ready; the line forms on the right.

Justice and virtue, you will find, have been amazingly preserved.

         4.

         As water from a dwindling reservoir

         Uncovers mossy stones, new banks of silt,

         So every minute that I spend with you reveals

         New flaws, new features, new intangibles.

         We have been sitting here for hours—

         “I spent that summer in Madrid,

         The winter on the coast of France—

         The Millotsons were there, and Farnsworth.

         My work has perished with the rest

         Of Europe, gone, all gone. We will not see the end.”

         You said goodbye, and your perfume

         Lingered for hours. At first it seemed

         Like summer dying there, then rank and sharp.

         And yet I did not air the room.

      5.

      Among Victorian beadwork and the smell of plush,

      The owls, stuffed and marvelously sinister,

      Glare from dark corners, waiting for the night.

      High up, the moose’s passive eyes explore

      Candles, unlit, within cut-glass. A door

      Is opened, and you enter with a look

      You might have saved for Pliny or the Pope.

      The furniture has shrunk now thirty years

      Have passed (with talent thinning out, and words

      Gone dead), and mouths of friends in photographs

      Display their hopeful and outmoded smiles.

      You counted on at least a sputter of nostalgia,

      However fretful. That was a mistake. Even the moose

      Regards you with a tired, uncomprehending stare.

         6.

         Signboards commemorate their resting place.

         The graveless of another century

         Came and were conquered; now their bones

         Are dust where idiot highways run.

         Land in their eyes, unquiet ancestors

         (On fences yellow signs clang in the wind)

         Unstirred by suns drying the brown weeds

         Above them now in parched and caking land.

         But when they speak of you, they feel the need

         Of voices polished and revised by history,

         The martial note, words framed in capitals.

         It is good to be deaf in a deafening time

         With the sky gone colorless, while the dead

         Thunder breaks, a cracked dish, out of the mind.

      7.

      The eye no longer single: where the bowl,

      Dead in the thickened darkness, swelled with light,

      Transformed the images and moved the artist’s hand,

      Becomes a framework for our mania.

      And haunts the stairway. Friends depart,

      Taking their last look from the roof,

      Saying goodnight and carrying their view

      Of grapes the model ate in Paris years ago.

      Blue in the morning, green some afternoons;

      The night, ambiguous, forgets the signature.

      The dust in attics settled and his stove

      Grew cold. About the model nothing much is known.

      It ends the wall and complements the view

      Of chimneys. And it hides a stain.

         8.

         And when your beauty, washed away

         In impure streams with my desire,

         Is only topic for ill-mannered minds,

         Gifted and glassy with exact recall,

         Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair,

         Let ruined weather perish in the streets

         And let the world’s black lying flag come down.

         Only in calendars that mark no Spring

         Can there be weather in the mind

         That moves to you again as you are now:

         Tired after love and silent in this house,

         Your back turned to me, quite alone,

         Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair,

         At a small window, green with rain.

Testing Your Smile That Ripened into Catastrophe

L got a spot in a big deal plein air event in Ellicott City weekend after next, we scouted yesterday, first time there since the second catastrophic flood (there are these everywhere) 

charming tiny unique ancient spooky place, not back yet from the floods (and probably never will be), Dead store gone (was after first catastrophic flood) though there is a bong shop near the train station

Tomorrow BLCKDGRD Bleggalgazing Day so links today before too stale, yes, people in Howard County call themselves Hocos, laugh, don't know there will be a bleggalgaze (especially compared to last year's) but guarantee two theme songs and one Guy Beneath the Seats skit

Laugh, replying with a photo to a friend who has an Elkin *George Mills* with cover from same Warner mass market editions of his novels, how did the artist know to use Ted Cruz as model for Leo in the clown suit in 1980
On the internet we are always living in the past
Communism, the Manifesto, and Hate
All igspay lie				List w no name 67
Saving lives is *not* what igspay do
Foreign wars make Americans feel great!
Monkey poxmania!				We don't live in a society
White supremacy is, essentially, an ecosystem built around the idea of never having to fight fair
Racism and violence start from the top
The almighty gun				Cops lie, kids die
Did Elites really take over identity politics?
FRESH HELL				Still the king of cracker whisperers, he's running
Kayfabe populism				Maggie's weekly
Big gods and big societies? Closure?
Doomsday DJ: Dave Foley interview
Counter-comedians				Privatized child prison is the dream
It's 10PM: Do you know where your cat is?
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				Biden in Uvalde
The Bittersweet Ballad of Karen Dalton

POEM INSTEAD OF A LETTER

Weldon Kees

Gold Bell in a Coffin in Case I Wake Up

Fleabus Saturday night wondering what Momcat doing in the house, once upon a time every post on this shitty blog had a Fleabus photo

Here's Stanley wondering the same thing

Saturday we tried Pax River State Park, such as it is, public land used primarily by hunters, half a dozen deer carcasses in the trailhead parking lot on Brown Church Road north of 80 on 27, hunters dress the deer on site, leave what they don't harvest for the winged corpse-eaters. The trail down to the Patuxent completely iced for bob-sledding, obstacled with fallen trees, I took 27 to 108 to 650 (past Griffith Road) to Howard Chapel Road right to Sundown (you better take care) right to Zion left to Rachel Carson Conservancy and one of our favorite hikes

Hiked Little Bennett yesterday, icy, should have thought of sticks, Little Bennett has more of my installations than all other Moco hikes combined (it has many different hikes, we rotate them a lot). Most are destroyed by wind and rain or squirrels or chipmunks and interior tree rot which contract I signed upon installation, I often find the plastic animals in the leaves and new mulch beneath the trees, but a few I build for more permanence, see the superglue print on the stone, all four feet were superglued to the stone, there was a friend's bulldog altared there by request, a chipmunk didn't do this, fine metaphors abound that I need to work past

Dreams and kindness are all we have
Total awareness of nothing
Look don't look				Hope ≠ optimism
The history of anti-vaxxers
The shitlord side-hustle neoliberalism created
The year of magical thinking
FRESH HELL			Maggie's weekly links
Everyone's a critic				Steven Heighton?
A poem by Weldon Kees					ANOTHER
The long difficult history of literary maps
{ feuilleton }'s weekend links

THE ARISTOCRACY

Sandra Simonds

I like when the form is kind of stuck-up

   even though I’ve got a Southern accent and my place

looks like a graduate student’s. 1. I enjoy

   high art but realism swamps me.

            2. The material world swamps me.

                              3. I came to understand

                                                the forms of realism,

                                                             the aesthetic phenomenon.

                                                                      4. You take a random person

                                                                                                from daily life.

                                                                   5. You take their dependence

                                                         on their historical circumstances.

                                                                   6. You make them

                                                         the subject.

                                      7. You see, they operate

                                      the modern.

      Things happen ... minutes, hours, days.

       The order of life

          coming from life itself.

                                     Back to life /

                                     Back to reality (like Soul II Soul).

                                                       It is sublime

                                                   and grotesque.

                                                                8. They make rich forms.

   Something steady.

   Less manic.

         Something real

                                                like a bell

                                                  inside the Golden Seahorse Gift Shop.

                                                                Don’t take me

                                                                            on that ride.

                                                            I don’t want

                                                         to go down.

                                         9. To what degree

                                  are the subjects

         taken seriously?

   They naturally swim

                            beneath the icy sheets

                                               and find breathing holes.

                                         They may remember

                                                         their arctic homes.

                                                                            They are one of the park’s

                                                          most sociable creatures. I said

                                          enter the water with them.

                               Graceful imitation of strange

   palms and seaflowers. A seaflower

     of a thousand colors, aquarium

              pigmented. It is my violent

  passion for seaflowers, Molly.

I want the entire

         underwater palace

          built of roaring seaflowers!

    Beluga! Beluga! Wither and mow.

         The child’s song.

  Emerald kayak

        and the femme fatale

                                 who sleeps in it, Victorian,

                                                          long, frothy hair

                                         and the death drive,

     flesh like the statement, “I lost a friend

          in the sea garden.”

                          The notes, staccato, vortex,

                                           paradisiacal, gold bell in a coffin

     just in case I wake up. And the way

                                                 darkness tunnels

       inside a car on its way

                        to its pinpoint destination.

No one tells you

                    the moon’s going

                                             to end up like this.

                                         No one. So you just move towards it.

    That’s all the moon

                               ever was. Ding. Ding.