You'll Rejoice at How Many Kinds of Shit There Are

Finished *Suttree.* I have more words to look-up and will decide whether to provide just that list or incorporate the new words into a cumulative list of all words looked-up by next linky post which won't happen until Wednesday at the earliest, Friday most likely. Strange, fascinating, deep and deepening ambivalence about the book, repellently compelling and compellingly repellent like all McCarthy, but Suttree himself reminds me of me, someone who turned down life opportunities for success as defined by the American capitalistic model path of success in my youth (though even at my most destructive I was never hit in the head with a floor buffer in a drunken brawl in a Tennessee roadhouse). Finished it yesterday morning just before 27 holes at Seneca where I threw my single worse round in years, the same course lay out I threw an 89 last week I threw a 114 yesterday, not blaming the novel, blaming me (for thinking I'd throw an 88) thinking about the novel instead of concentrating on throwing with elbow tucked and disc nose down, I was in the creek on three, four, five, thirteen and fourteen, thinking how Suttree wouldn't tag ever day of his life but two My Complicity. Way more going on than one read can reveal, will read again next summer, whether more McCarthy between then and now tbd, several lozenges of not-McCarthy before another, I want this one in my head





Meanwhile, while the Amazon bot in Singapore continues to ping this shitty blog fifty times an hour, each ping a different IP address, it has been joined by a sibling Amazon bot in Turkiye (sic) pinging this shitty blog twenty times an hour, each ping a different IP address, and the Apple bot in Shanghai still pinging me thirty times an hour, each ping a different IP address, all of these unrelated to my posting now a recently discovered and just released out-take from Steely Dan's *Gaucho,* I love Steely Dan, perhaps this will cause the bots (and you!) to quit this shitty blog in disgust!

Today in War Propaganda!
Kamala Harris and U.S. Imperialism
"But remember, the REAL antisemitism that must be shut down at all costs, including destroying US free speech & right to boycott/protest, is criticism of Israel & Zionism…"
The Infantilism Of Totalitarianism
Especially American women-rightwingers
How the Oil and Gas Industry Is Quietly Thwarting Progress on the Climate Crisis, Yet Again
My state's governor gets The New Yorker star treatment
Duh Reminder: Democratic Party gameplan forever
LET THE PLATFORMS BURN
Maggie's weekly				FRESH HELL
How We’ll Mess Up The Environment on the Moon
The Messy Job Of Repairing Historic Wrongs
The End of Something
{ feuilleton }'s weekly				ELKIN'S CHAIRS
It's been 25 years since 69 Love Songs released, I love love love pre-69 Magnetic Fields, love love 69 Love Songs, love some of post-69 Mag Fields (there will be song from *Love at the Bottom of the Sea* here Thursday this week, in fact), really really dislike late Mag Fields, especially 50 songs. I wonder what a ticket to the 69 anniversary tour will cost
Gig #162: Autechre				Ammon's shit list

SHIT LIST; OR, OMNIUM-GATHERRUM OF DIVERSITY INOT UNITY

A.R. Ammons

You’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:
gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout

shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,

horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit

(dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit, gannet

shit (wholesome guano), fly shit (periodic), cockatoo
shit, dog shit (past catalog or assimilation),
cricket shit, elk (high plains) shit, and

tiny scribbled little shrew shit, whale shit (what
a sight, deep assumption), mandril shit (blazing
blast off), weasel shit (wiles’ waste), gazelle shit,

magpie shit (total protein), tiger shit (too acid
to contemplate), moral eel and manta ray shit, eerie
shark shit, earthworm shit (a soilure), crab shit,

wolf shit upon the germicidal ice, snake shit, giraffe
shit that accelerates, secretary bird shit, turtle
shit suspension invites, remora shit slightly in

advance of the shark shit, hornet shit (difficult to
assess), camel shit that slaps the ghastly dry
siliceous, frog shit, beetle shit, bat shit (the

marmoreal), contemptible cat shit, penguin shit,
hermit crab shit, prairie hen shit, cougar shit, eagle
shit (high totem stuff), buffalo shit (hardly less

lofty), otter shit, beaver shit (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw shit, alligator shit (that floats the Nile

along), louse shit, macaque, koala, and coati shit,
antelope shit, chuck-will’s-widow shit, alpaca shit
(very high stuff), gooney bird shit, chigger shit, bull

shit (the classic), caribou shit, rasbora, python, and
razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, laswing
fly larva shit, chipmunk shit, other-worldly wallaby

shit, gopher shit (or broke), platypus shit, aardvark
shit, spider shit, kangaroo and peccary shit, guanaco
shit, dolphin shit, aphid shit, baboon shit (that leopards

induce), albatross shit, red-headed woodpecker (nine
inches long) shit, tern shit, hedgehog shit, panda shit,
seahorse shit, and the shit of the wasteful gallinule.

We Left in 2 Separate Cars, 1 Headed for Circumstance, 1 Headed for Mars

This year's edition of the traditional post, odometer honest:

Sixty-one today, this guy. When we met in 5th grade fifty-two years ago neither of us predicted the weirdest year of our lives would be 2021.

Always this: twenty-eight years ago Landru was the first human not Earthgirl or me or a doctor/nurse to hold Planet.

   
*

   


And especially

Even the Prick of the Thistles

• An email will go out today from the Committee to Restore Hoopla for Our Demoralized Workers in response to a staff survey during plague in which the overwhelming take away is that everyone thought their boss gah before the plague, holyfuck is the fucker GAH! during the plague
• The Committee has commisioned a *Wow! Look at *This* Worker's Exceptional Processing of Book Orders and Removal of Ordered Books from Delivery Boxes and Getting the Books to the Metadata Librarian* digital bulletin board on the staff wiki because pitting underappreciated workers against each other to see just who IS the least appreciated a time-proven remedy for bad morale in the servants
• Not only bigs can praise littles, littles can praise littles too, and littles in one department can praise littles in other departments, if this happened in your work universe you can immediately imagine which littles will be keeping score (and which littles will oil bigs)
  
• The email announcing the upcoming email to all staff disclosed to those of us with direct reports, we've a schedule set up, each of us one nice thing to say about one of our direct reports minimum per assigned week, BUT THESE ARE TO APPEAR TO BE SPONTANEOUS AND THE SCHEDULE IS TOP SECRET!
• I shit you not
  
• The Kudos Board, as it's christened, not moderated, one must log-in and touch an app on one's phone, but no rules of behavior will be listed in the email, and the three people who would have blown up the board left the library, one of them, an acquaintance told me, in jail for his basement's unlicensed armory
• Creating a board in which the implicit but unwritten rule demands I say only nice things about others is kindergarden, and so am I
• If you know of what and where I speak I hope you enjoyed this enough my trust in your discretion certain 
• The message is: share the kibble or no more kibble for you, reducing your kibble as an exercise in Fuck You! an eternal shitlord wetdream
  
• I just started the obvious pantoum, will or won't be here later, abandoning more here now because I love you and also found the Kids in the Hall *Hoopla* sketch, gah, gags
  

No, actually, censorship isn't good		You and the moon				Postcolonial criticism
The coal plant next door				Today in duhserving power
Each American Covid death was worth $4,268 to America’s billionaires
How to be animal		My war with John Ashbery		Heathen's Easter		Pantoum
Pauline Oliveros				Anselm Hollo
Amy Gerstler				Annea Lockwood

IN PERPETUAL SPRING

Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt   

there is a leaf to cure it.

I've Enjoyed Making You Miserable for Years

A tweet from @theMagFields one hour and twenty minutes ago I type this sentence:

On this day in 1999, we released 69 Love Songs. We’re not sure we can top all of the stories that you’ve shared about what the album has meant to you, so we’ll celebrate today by continuing to read and share your stories. Thank you all for listening.

One of my five most-listened to albums (even though I like pre-69 Magnetic Fields more), listened to at Earthgirl and Planet's request each Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Washington to Wheeling to Zanesville to Gambier and back for Planet's four years at college, here, have five of my favorite 69 songs. Click for LOTS more Mag Fields, not just 69.

 
  

*

  
 

*

 

             

*

  

Baby You Could Be Famous

Me (thank you, Planet!) on the right front balcony of Lincoln Theater last night exploring before the first night of Magnetic Fields' 50 Song tour. I am about to pull out my phone to take a photo of the stage set - as I did, two Lincoln Theater staff members appeared from shadows to tell me NO PHOTOS! I said, yes, I was told when I came in, but I thought that meant no photos of the band while on stage, and they said NO PHOTOS! on orders of Magnetic Fields, and that while they wouldn't kick me out if I snuck one they couldn't guarantee one of the Lincoln Theater upper staff wouldn't see me and kick me out on orders of Magnetic Fields. Hah! earlier from the floor - come get me, Copper.

Merritt sat alone in that faux room while the band sat, except for Davol on the left wing and whoever was the synthesizerist on the right, behind the room, seen but obscured. Merritt mentioned their names each once. Shirley Simms was there, hidden, but John Woo wasn't there. Claudia Gonson wasn't there. There was a woman - Merritt called her Pinky Something, who played violin, kazoo, saw. There was a guy who's name I missed on horns and drums, a guy whose name I missed on piano. They were tight, anonymous. I found myself thinking of Peleg and Bildad's scam when negotiating with Ishmael over Ishmael's lay - what tenth of a tenth of the tenth dollar does Simms get?

I say this as someone who has seen Magnetic Fields at least a dozen times (last night, after saying that "autobiographical" doesn't mean "true," he called himself an "only child" - um, not true). Merritt didn't like performing before his tinnitus worsened - his hand went to his left ear constantly last night - but more, he's never liked the live performance requirement of his chosen profession. He did not adlib once from script - he read the jokes from his notes. He had no interaction with the audience, not once. He had no interaction with the band - is this why Claudia isn't there? - she always taunted him between songs, insisted Magnetic Fields was not just Merritt's backing band.

If I will never love 50 Songs (it gets better with each listen - I will never love it) it is by definition a Stephen Merritt autobiographical project and I knew going in I wasn't going to see the Magnetic Fields I want to see (and quite possibly, if not probably, will never see again). It was disturbingly joyless, as everything seems joyless now, especially those very indulgences that once gave most joy. Rotely ironic, the fine fucking metaphors abounding. I blame me.

the wind is the wind is a no-vo-cain band

• New Magnetic Fields, my favorite of the few new 50 I've heard, release in March.
• Four theories on the unscheduled and until last Friday unnoticed cessation of scribbling in tablets, all of which suggest scribbling in tablets is precisely what I need doing:

1. The fate of kayfabe in a world of fake leaves me ink-tied: how to write in a world without kayfabe?
2. I still have not rid myself of my indoctrinated faith in the human capability to survive its assholes and waver between futile anger and tongue-tied humor.
3. Like everyone else, I can't get past assigning blame in the micro for the current clusterfuck even while this clusterfuck, macro, ahead of schedule, yes, was inevitable.
4. I am obsolete, as are pencils and paper, as are fine metaphors abounding.

• I typed this joke HERE in the context of this post: fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man, Buck Turgidson said, in his Grammy winning role of Patton in the American classic, Stroke Me.
• I would never have written that joke in tablet, I would have put pen down, turned to laptop, the saved to 2018 draft (I haven't fucked that up in months, I think), and typed the joke there, for you (to admire my range).

• The Father, the Son, the Holy Shitstorm. 
• Election 2020 predictions.
• On making them look like victims.
• The Monument Wars.
• Writing and memory.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Field recording as respite from the world.
• 50 Years Ago in Grateful Dead.
• Tom Raworth, RIP.

THE UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

Tom Raworth

1. gone to lunch back in five minutes
  

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

it is a long coat and a van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes    the arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam
                

2. walking my back home
                   

the wind

is the wind

is a no-vo-cain band

and the footstep

                          echoes

i

have conjured people
                          

3. ah, it all falls into place
  

when it was time what he had left became a tile

bodies held shaped by the pressure of air

were clipped to his attention by their gestures

my but we do have powerful muscles

each of us equal to gravity

or sunlight that forces our shadows

into the pieces of a fully interlocking puzzle
                   

4. good morning he whispered
  

the horrors of the horses are the crows

the bird flies past the outside the library

many heels have trapped the same way

he tolls, he lapsed with the light from so many trees

check the pattern swerves with the back

the tree that holds the metal spiral staircase swings

aloft the hand removes a book and checked it

for death by glasses or the angle food descends
   

5. the broadcast
   

she turns me on she turns on me

that the view from the window is a lake

and silent cars are given the noise of flies dying in the heat

of the library    the grass outside goes brown

in my head behind my glasses behind the glass in the precinct

thus, too, they whisper in museums and banks

*Hydrate." Please

5th row center, me and Earthgirl and Planet and Air. New album 50 Song Memoir drops early 2017:

Unlike Merritt’s previous work, the lyrics on 50 Song Memoir are nonfiction, a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis). There is one song per year for the fifty years since the songwriter’s birth in 1965. Musically, the sound ranges as widely and adventurously as possible, within the context of lyrics-driven music. 

In concert, the music will be played and sung by seven performers in a stage set featuring fifty years of artifacts both musical (vintage computers, reel-to-reel tape decks, newly invented instruments), and decorative (tiki bar, shag carpet, vintage magazines for the perusal of idle musicians). The seven performers each play seven different instruments, traditional (cello, charango, clavichord) or invented in the last fifty years (Slinky guitar, Swarmatron, synthesizer).

Nonfiction. Cause Merritt's never dipped into his life for his music before.

• Return.
• At least it's not patriarchy.
• Somebody hacked into Montag's place and posted at Stump Lane.
• This is why there is a blogroll called Moribund.
• This week in water.
• Nemo's Almanac?
• Bottom's Dream. I've twice had it in Dalkey's cart then told myself don't, it's a curiosity not a need, I'm not going to read it, plus there's the problem of translation - I've worked past my issues of novels in translation, still have issues with poetry in translation, what the fuck to do with gibberish (this is not a pejorative term!) in translation?
• Bottom's Dream, week three.
• OK, so now it's been in Dalkey's cart three times.
• Orchestral manipulations.
• Stream the new Leonard Cohen.
• All Merritt projects innermost circle of my rotating three seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five game. Lots here.

MEDITATION ON THE SOURCES OF CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION

Lucie Brock-Broido

Green as alchemy and even more scarce, little can be known

Of the misfortunes of a saint condemned to turn great sorrows

Into greater egrets, ice-bound and irrevocable. The wings were left ajar

At the altar where I've knelt all night, trembling, leaning, rough

As sugar raw, and sweet. From the outside, peering in, it would seem

My life had been smooth as a Prussian ship gliding on the bridegroom

Of her Baltic waters in a season of no wind. Tinny empire,

Neighborhood of Bokhara silks, were you to go, I would stop—simply

                                As a pilgrim putting down his cup. Most of my life,

I had consorted with the unspeakable, longing to put my mouth

On it. I was just imagining. I can be

Resumed. Some nights, I paint into the scene two Doves,

I being alternately one and then the other, calling myself by my kind.

                                                  In the living will if it says: Hydrate. Please.

Hydration only. Do not resume me then.

then decomposes to be reabsorbed

Ascending Bernard Mountain yesterday ▲. I have a second complaint about Acadia National Park - parking blows. I understand why, and to the park's credit they run constant shuttles from the large parking lot at Park Headquarters, and we've been the fucks who won't use them. My complicity and fine metaphors etc. We got to the Gorge Path trail head yesterday at nine, all four parking spots taken, no road parking allowed. Instead of Dorr and Cadillac Mountains yesterday we climbed Mansell and Bernard Mountains. We've now done all of the western half of Acadia. We going to try to leave the house shortly to get to Gorge trail head, and I've alternatives for when we find the four spots taken already anyway, but Earthgirl is still asleep and I'm not gonna wake her, so maybe Door and Cadillac tomorrow and Champlain and Penobscot today. Right now? From where I'm typing, taken just now, a photo of a shadow of a hummingbird dipping at a red feeder!

• O! I am way better - though still responsibly cautious - with rocks and on heights than I was two weeks ago.
• Tears and torment.
• In yesterday's post I mentioned the Hillarium smearing Jill Stein as an anti-vaxxer. I had no idea whether Stein is an anti-vaxxer or not, but I knew beloved Landru (who will get the sillyass Star Trek allusion in this post's title) would and would respond. From comments:

It's no smear. At best, Jill Stein is pandering to anti-vaxxers. And she knows it--she made an effort to walk back her position and got busted at it. If that is true, it's completely unforgivable and absolutely disqualifies her from any leadership position in organized society. I understand that you don't give a shit about that, since you're fundamentally opposed to organized society in general, and that's your business and I've long since accepted it, kindly and lovingly, I hope. But no quarter for a fucking idiot of her magnitude. An idiot who is, I hear tell, an actual medical doctor. Fucking despicable.

At worst, she's an actual anti-vaxxer, and it looks to me like that's the case, because the language she uses in pandering to anti-vaxxers is exactly the language that anti-vaxxers use to claim they're not anti-vaxxers. EXACTLY that language. I know that you trust my qualifications to gauge that without reference to politics. And I credit that it's possible that she's pandering, which is not, as I noted, a save for her. Not even close.

She's a nutbar and has no business running for office, and if she's actually an anti-vaxxer instead of just another pandering shithead politician, she and any offspring for which she's responsible have no business being around other humans.

• To which I responded:

I'll take your word for it on Stein and anti-vaxxing: this is how I figured to do my research on the subject: I know the issue is important to you and you're far more informed than most people on the subject.

I was hoping the Hillarium was *right* on that: it throws so much bullshit that accurate insightful and useful information that would be vital in forming an opinion about a candidate just sounds like so much Hillarium disinformation. I wish I had been clearer in the post that was part of my point in the first place. As I said, I don't know shit about Stein, but I do know how the Hillarium works.

• So that's that on Stein and anti-vaxxery, and that's that on what I was trying to do. 
• Slime.
• When Hillary tries to seduce Henry.
• The Drone Presidency. 
• Evan McMullen?
• Almost a year ago today on this blog: Larry Lessig?
• The Whitehead - um, I'm running out of patience. It's not fantastic, in any of the uses of that word. And what the fuck is a published novelist doing using the word "enormity" to mean "big." That's borderline disqualifying right there. 
• On Lerner's Hatred of Poetry, which I know I should read but can't yet make myself. 
• Up to the I's playlist-wise (blessed Serendipity, the first one):

 



[rain frog        thorn bug        tent bat]

Francine Sterle

rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat

along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path

soaring trees    woody buttresses    their massive twisted fins

lofty crowns    shoulder to shoulder    climbing lime-green

vines    restless palms    one strangling plant    clinging to

choking another    a discontinuous canopy of branches and leaves

impenetrable    alive and teeming    tangled underbrush

the deeply shaded soil    lumpy roots    writhing

across the forest floor    low-growing ferns    seedlings

struggling for light    jewel-colored hummingbirds

insects sizzling and clicking and the dripping water

trickling into the tiniest crevices    steamy

claustrophobic air    a dazzling bellbird    lost

in a shaft of sunlight    a golden eyelash viper

sinuous as a vein on a broad-leafed frond    flat worms

land leeches    walnut-sized spiders    goliath beetles

camouflaged butterflies on dead leaves    parasites    bees

leaf-cutting ants atop glorious white lilies    everywhere

gripping    climbing    twisting    floating through the trees

stilt-like aerial roots    the mouth-amazed pitcher plant

buried larvae    fruit-eating fish    the perpetual battle to adapt

the ruthless drive    to survive under a punishing sun

what grows    bursts forth at astonishing speed    then decomposes

to be reabsorbed    so much unknown    unfamiliar

unnamed    but before long    the trees seem the same

the rocks    every bird track    who would dare think of such a place

who would dare        construct one         of his own imagining

and be utterly abandoned    in the middle of it all

if to be lost is to be fully present    if confusion becomes

the only boundary    and then    the decision    [to divide space

until a direction is created]    only a madman would begin

thought is its own cage    the mind    already anticipating

the first step    deciding    every turn will be coupled

by disaster    and perhaps    some bestial creature

crouched at the center    crying    waiting

for our hero    our everyman    our Elijah wandering the earth in rags

Your Chordal List of Hates

Two new Stephin Merritt songs, Lo and La, for Lola the rat terrier who steals the show.

It wasn't Thursday Night Pints (which are no more) though I did have a pint with a friend last night. She's an unabashed mainstream Democrat and enthusiastic Inevitability proponent. It's important to her that a woman wins POTUS, and frankly that symbolism is the ONLY reason I don't find the thought of Inevitability A-to-Z repugnant. Think of how it will make rightwingers nuts, N said. If on the day after Obama won POTUS in 2008, I said, you'd told me that in 2015 there would be a mass public revulsion against the Confederate flag with concurrent rightwing freakout and that conservative SCOTUS judges would uphold a health care bill deemed socialist by rightwingers with concurrent rightwing freakout, and these had happened in the same week, I not only wouldn't believe you but would have signed on for that comedy blockbuster in a nanosecond. N said, I know you're disappointed with Democrats in particular and Obama in general, but the anti-Confederacy bullshit doesn't make you happy? I haven't been taking my daily tribal viagra for years, I said, I can't achieve a boner much less a flaggasm.

• UPDATE! And now Scalia, Alito, and Thomas lose on gay marriage. I am small enough, I confess, to relish the thought of their heads exploding.
• UPDATE! OK, I confess, I'm feeling some tiny reawakening of schadenfreude over this one. 
• UPDATE! OK, it's gone. 
• White American terrorists.
• Meet the new police reform bosses.
• The failure of utopian desire.
• There is no Baltimore City in Larry Hogan's Maryland.
• Martin O'Malley couldn't get his Lt Gov elected over GOP buffoon Larry Hogan in an overwhelmingly blue state and daydreams that someday he will be POTUS.
• Studying the ashes under the stars.
• Zombie gets death scare, thankfully is OK, makes Nick Cave allusion.
• Sylvia Plath reading her poetry.
• Thomas Bernhard, for those of you who do.

ARGUMENT OVER, AMOUNTING

Clark Coolidge

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t

the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally

and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan
    

You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite

your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready

receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat

behind the one you there are
   

Then the I not part of the you equation, but the

spider trying to build where it is written

vibrates tentative

I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore

crystal region in its light, there are failures and

there are failures
   

But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the

final catch, trounced morning

this is awful but none other available, words reach

and visually fail to tie audibly retire

the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of

turning aside remind
   

I am hopefully

this is position

of the world overcome by

and by the wind takes our voice

the collateral one voice

   

I Asked Him How He Sustained Himself in This New Free-Market Situation When Even the Human Species Suffered from Malnutrition

• Dennis the Peasant is 72 today.
• Gramsci: "I hate the indifferent."
• Vote for Death.
• Inauguration.
• Jim's joint gets an unscheduled face lift. (I... fuck it.)
• Attention, if you please.
• This is true: I made a third good faith attempt to knausgaard his struggle and failed again. A small fraction of that failure is my inability to digest overtly autobiographical fiction. I don't know that I've read autobiographies in decades, since school required. And it feels like cheating to me, no matter how ingeniously conceived and brilliantly executed. In Knausgaard's defense, I hated the fuck this time within minutes, I've learned when suddenly clutched with such a visceral hate it's because the object of that hate reminds me intensely of something I hate about me. There was a paragraph roughly thirty pages in when Knausgaard, remembering an incident in his teen years, listed in his head, typed into the manuscript, road-by-road, the route of a truck from his parents' house to a distant city. WHAT KIND OF SICK FUCK DOES THAT?
• Secret Boxes: so now I'll try Galeano, hope to be shamed to have needed his death to learn of his writing. I jinx no matter how I type this sentence, but so far so b(s)a(u)n(c)g(k)o.
• So a bleggalgaze on hating bleggalgazing, w(b)o(e)r(s)s(t)t s(l)i(a)c(s)c(t)e u(n)n(e)t(x)i(t)l.
• Hey, Frances is back from Ecuador - unrelated to Ecuador, recommends a novel.
• Zombie sees Replacements.
• The Beerfoot Servants.
• Experimental Fiction Now.
• You, me.
• Scifi short fiction, for those of you who do.
• Notes toward a remake of Сталкер.
• My second favorite Palin skit:

A PORTRAIT OF A DOG AS AN OLDER GUY

Katia Kapovich

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family

moved into their Moscow apartment,

he went to live with mongrels in the park.

In summer there was plenty of food, kids

often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff.

He didn’t have a big appetite,

still missing his old guy.

He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him,

and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around.

Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park.

The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him

but the minute he started rummaging in the

overturned garbage container, a voice

in his head said: “No, Rex!”

The remnants of a good upbringing lower

our natural survival skills.

I met him again in the early spring of 2001.

He looked terrific. Turning gray became him.

His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright,

like those of a puppy.

I asked him how he sustained himself

in this new free-market situation

when even the human species suffered from malnutrition.

In response he told me his story;

how at first he thought that life without his man

wasn’t worth it, how those

who petted him when he was a pet

then turned away from him, and how one night

he had a revelation.

His man came to him in his sleep,

tapped him on his skinny neck and said:

“Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway

and went to the street market

where they used to go together every Sunday and where

vendors recognized him and fed him

to his heart’s content.

“Perhaps you should move closer to that area?”

I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed,

“oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s

what my man said.”

Indeed, he sounded like one himself.

Merritt, 6th & I, May 3 2015, Songs A-Z

Book of Love

Chicken with Its Head Cut Off

Dead Only Quickly

Epitaph for My Heart

Forever and a Day

Give Me Back My Dreams

100,000 Fireflies

I Wish I Had an Evil Twin

Josephine

Kiss Me Like You Mean It

Lot Like Love (?)

My Husband's Pied-a-Terre

Nun's Litany

One Long Fairytale (?)

Pretty Girl

Quick

Reno Dakota

Shipwrecked

This Little Ukelele

Ugly Little Duck

Very Funny

World Is a Disco Ball

Xylophone Track

Your Girlfriend's Face

To Whisper of the Religion Upstairs in the Dark

Blessed Serendipity: Magnetic Fields/all Stephin Merritt projects are both Earthgirl's and Planet's favorite bar none. Planet graduates college on May 16 in Just North of Appalachia in Northeast Mid-Central Ohio. I just bought her a graduation present, tickets for Merritt in Columbus the evening she graduates:

Stephin Merritt will embark on a rare solo tour of the U.S.A. starting May 2nd, 2015, accompanied by long-time bandmate Sam Davol on cello. The duo will play 14 dates across the country, including two dates in Los Angeles and shows in Washington, D.C.; Austin; San Francisco and more. Visit the calendar for the tour itinerary and ticket information.

For this series of intimate performances, Merritt will present a set of solo, acoustic versions of selected songs from his wide ranging catalog. As a framework, Merritt plans to perform 26 of his songs in alphabetical order. Will he begin with "Absolutely Cuckoo" or "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off," or...? Will he end with "Zebra" or "Zombie Boy," or...? You'll find out!

Wasn't sure if anyone else who might be joining us or not, so four tickets. Earthgirl and I are also going to see this in DC on May 3, tickets on sale Friday, I'm to buy four, one for Hamster and one for - I'm not going to lie to you, Brother - the woman Earthgirl wants to set him up with. Earthgirl will claim that the woman GENUINELY loves Magnetic Fields so while this IS technically a set-up the audacity of the set-up is mitigated by the woman's genuine love of Magnetic Fields. She believes this, I'm not going to argue. It's an early May Sunday, Brother, surely you've a ticket to something already that night. If not, find something. Or join us.

I'm hoping this will be the I song at one of the shows:

• Do I want to see The Replacements? No. No, I don't think I do. This reeks of sad.
• From the repository.
• Leaving the 20th century.
• One thousand and one mights.
• What progress means.
• #195, #196, #200.
• What is a treatment?
• A piece of a hole.
• Yes, I know, yesterday was Jack Gilbert's birthday. Gilbert and Ammons, born on the same day one year apart. Click tag for more Gilbert poems.

HARD WIRED

Jack Gilbert

He is shamelessly happy to feel the thing
inside him. He labors up through the pines
with firewood and goes back down again.
Winter on the way. Roses and blackberries
finished, and the iris gone before that.
The peas dead in the garden and the beans
almost done. His tomatoes are finally ripe.
The thing inside him is like that, and will
come back. An old thing, a dangerous one.
Precious to him. He meets the raccoon often
in the dark and ends up throwing stones.
The raccoon gets behind a tree. Comes again,
cautious and fierce. It stops halfway.
They stand glaring in the faint starlight.

RELATIVE PITCH

Jack Gilbert

I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. Discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.

TO SEE IF SOMETHING COMES NEXT

Jack Gilbert

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the No-: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still he is dancing.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE

Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warwaw against the German
tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not MacBeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
and the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, not Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. and the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
that is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.