A Secret Fund of Rage Frees Him from All Worldly Obligations

I call bullshit on Brexit, I said to my Hillaryite Friend. Bullshit on Trump, bullshit on the idea that Oligarchs are SHOCKED! by a tidal wave of right-wing nationalist populism. This is the gentlest stomp-down of dissent of the obsolete old white working class possible (while keeping them viably threatening through the hip-replacement/oxygen-tube 2018 mid-term election years) and a stomp-out of dissent from what passes as dissent from the Left. Hillaryite Friend said, you're buying, told you you couldn't go ten minutes.

• Planet told me Fleabus is a Colorpoint Shorthair, I said to my Hillaryite Friend, who tells me she thinks Fleabus is a Red Point Siamese. I said Fleabus is best cat ever.
• The markets are going to be fucking fine, Oligarch-wise, don't worry. Or they'll make new markets on those private Micronesian islands with no extradition treaties to any fucking place.
• O! I finally figured out the splinter that ruins Star Trek Next Gen for me: Jordi is taken capture by Romulans. The Romulans plug into Jordi's visual neural implants and visor and condition him to receive E-Band signals he must obey beyond his accord. He almost kills a Klingon somebody. In the movie Star Trek: Motherfucking Kirk Finally Dies, Jordi is captured by the dude from Clockwork Orange and DAMN! if he doesn't manipulate Jordi's visor. The Clockwork Orange dude sells the technology to Lursa and B'Etor who use it - see, it didn't occur to Picard in particular or StarFleet in general to implement policies about what to do after blind guys with visors have been captured after the same guy had already been captured and manipulated by visor- to destroy the Enterprise. Good on Lursa and B'Etor, but Star Trek writers think I'm stupid.
• I seem to be the only person bothered by this.
• Oh, and fuck Bernie Sanders. Run as an independent or shut the fuck up.
• Neoliberal technocracy.
• Rules, games, patterns.
• How not to do a coup.
• Kirk died, but The Federation was saved. The Federation is always saved.
• Gass has always preferred prepositions.
• A phenomenology of ignorance - Keith Waldrup's selected. Just bought.
• Robert Wyatt.
• New Aphex Twin!
• When music is violence.
• Pere Ubu played a short set on Brian's show yesterday, listen to archives.

UNDER THE BRIDGE

Mark Ford

A secret fund of rage
Frees him from all worldly obligations.
He casts it out like the nearby
Fisherman, propped on their wooden stools.

The girders rumble, the house lights opposite
Come on. Two dogfish have expired
In my landing net. The madman
Has packed up his rod and tackle and gone.

Wild Guesses at Their Numbers and Meaning

Lardy, the cathartic viciousness of my glee at England losing to Iceland was so mean-fucking-spirited it shocked and rattled me. Proxy for everything, sure, and necessary vent, sure, and better directed there than elsewhere, sure, but jeebus, Jeff, be Kind, motherfucker.

So no link reading last night, just Olive photoed, Teeth of the Sea listened, Mark Ford poems read.









THE PASSING OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON

Mark Ford

This bird used to be the most numerous on Earth
And to blot out the sun for hours over Wisconsin and Michigan,
And to strip bare the great forests of cranberries, pine nuts, and acorns.

Whole trees toppled under the weight of roosting birds. In flight
They made a sound like Niagara Falls. Horses trembled,
And travelers made wild guesses at their numbers and meaning.

The bird's sad demise is chronicled on many websites. Children
Visit these for homework, and learn how far and fast the passenger pigeon
Flew, and that its breast was red, and head and rump slate blue.

As the opulent sun set, raccoon-hatted hunters would gather with pots
Of sulphur, and clubs and poles and ladders; in a trice they'd transform the dung-
Heaped forest floor into a two-foot carpet of smoldering pigeon.

Being so common, they sold in the city for only a few pence a dozen.
Farmers fed them to their pigs. By the century's end they had all
But joined the Great Auk and Labrador Duck in blissful oblivion.

The last known passenger pigeon was called Martha, after Martha
Washington. She died in Cincinnati Zoo on September 1st, 1914. Her stuffed
Remains were transported to the capital, and they're displayed in the Smithsonian.

These Tumblers Empty Themselves and Yet I Persist

I didn't remember until noon yesterday that June 5th is Richard Butler's birthday, yesterday his 57th. Fuck we are old. The above is my favorite Psychedelic Furs song, or is it this one? at least this very moment:







At least a half a dozen of the one of five best nights of my life revolved around Furs concerts.

Hey, I get mail:

I am writing to you today to inform you that Nuestar, the Registry Operator for the .US domain, will be increasing its annual registration price by $0.50 USD.   As a result of this notification, eNom must raise our pricing for this domain name extension. The purpose of this notice is to inform you of the upcoming price increase and give you advance notice should you want to renew any names ahead of the price change.

On July 1st, 2014 your price for .US will increase by $0.50

I thought about last summer's domain name dramafuck last night, thought I'd better check the email account I use for non-personal correspondence this morning, and shazam. I can spare the fifty cents, can't bare the aggravation of last summer this summer. I was assured last summer that there will be no repeat of the dramafuckery this summer. I have modest hope, massive dread. So: it's that time of year, if this blog goes dark without announcement like it did last summer the domain renewal is why. I know you know if I killed the blog there would be a loud melodramafuck production.

• What we learned from the Snowden Affair.
• Goodbye, normal genes.
• Purple Line.
• My two months of traffic hell began today.
• Mark introduces me to Marie-Claire Bancquart.
• Jim's Hawaiian vacation.
• Ira goes to Canada.
• A dialectical appreciation of twee?
• Eulogy for a cat.
• Joseph Ceravolo: what chemicals have we forgot?

TWENTY-TWENTY VISION

Mark Ford

Unwinding in a cavernous bodega he suddenly
Burst out:--Barman, these tumblers empty themselves
And yet I persist; I am wedged in the giant eye
Of an invisible needle. Walking through doors
Or into them, listening to anecdotes or myself spinning
A yarn, I realize my doom is never to forget
My lost bearings. In medias res we begin
And end: I was born, and then my body unfurled
As if to illustrate a few tiny but effective words--
But--oh my oh my--avaunt. I peered
Forth, stupefied, from the bushes as the sun set
Behind distant hills. A pair of hungry owls
Saluted the arrival of webby darkness; the dew
Descended upon the creeping ferns. At first
My sticky blood refused to flow, gathering instead
In wax-like drops and pools; mixed with water and a dram
Of colourless alcohol it thinned and reluctantly
Ebbed away. I lay emptied as a fallen
Leaf until startled awake by a blinding flash
Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst.            

We Crave Attention, Then Come Over All Coy

For those of you following along, here's Earthgirl's knee last night. (Background here for those who, um, need). The bruise is growing, larger and more colorful. There will not be a ten mile hike this weekend.

I've mentioned this before: my first love was baseball. After a bitterly delicious apostasy in the mid-90s (shouldn't all apostasies be delicious in their bitterness?) I've let baseball back in a few innings at a time though I'll never give my heart again. Still, RIP Don Zimmer, who embodied the wondrous daydream of the baseball-lifer and was a major character in baseball when baseball was part of my daily life. We had dinner with Hamster last night (who, along with Landru, took me to an Oriole game at Memorial, an 8-5 loss to the Washington Senators Texas Rangers, for my stag-party). He and Planet and I are going to try and get to a Nats game, perhaps as early as the next homestand (I didn't hear about Zimmer's death until this morning, Serendipity be great). Other Mocomofos and Bawlmer hons encouraged to join us.

I only link-fished friends this morning for new posts

• Don Durito on the return of force-feeding at Gitmo.
• Frances checks in from Santa Fe on the movement to end police violence in Albuquerque.
• Tom's School's Out.
• Smut Clyde does what Smut Clyde does.
• Flowerville on what proof is.
• Biblioklept rifts on William Vollmann's Europe Central.
• Ethan has science fiction for those of you who do.
• :-p wrote a poem.
• Jacob wrote a poem.
• Greyhoos has songs.

otherwise have two songs (fell asleep listening to Stephan Mathieu) and a poem (fell asleep reading Mark Ford, whose name I mention here since the poem's title is the beginning of a sentence, whose poetry I am overwhelmingly pleased to have just discovered, who has just been given his own tag, there will be more here):







WE CRAVE

attention, then come over all coy, and start fiddling
with watchstrap and buttons, or talking about a friend
of a friend who claims to own the world's largest collection
of aquarium ornaments, yet has no aquarium. In the mean-
time the tough-minded argue each of us is loved not
so much for his or her oddities, as in spite of them, or even
faute de mieux! Families form, squabble on long
car journeys, invent nicknames for strangers; the tires hum
their own tune, and in shimmering forecourts
the baked atmosphere presses from all sides, searing
the lungs. We commend, internally, the wisdom of the soft-
voiced tycoon who acquired the land, only
to flatten it, then skilfully divide it into distinct
yet related lots; a spongy layer of wood-chips lines
the criss-crossing paths, and whispers faintly underneath.

As it was drummed into me, I would drum it
into others: the art or science of management never
pauses, though it occasionally lies low, or enacts
retreat like a Parthian archer. Invariably, speed and stealth
take advantage of the famous, non-existent 'margin' poor
Herbert Pocket kept urging upon Pip; a sound decisive
as the whirr and double click of a computer mouse
signals the arrival of the inner bailiffs, and an era
of thrift. Listen harder, and through the virtual prison-bars
comes swarming the buzz of creditors and debtors over
lunch, each pledging allegiance to the other, to knowledge,
to the mysteries of living on this air....