Thus the Butcher Can Display Under Our Very Eyes His Hands on the Block

Slowest week of the year in the Blegsylvanian calendar so of course I'm gonna post though my tablets have gone silent, nothing but canvases of late, them and grids how I'm processing Life in the Assholoscene now



I didn't mention here that earlier this month when I was in Michigan while driving around in my car with Maryland plates I was targeted as a Subaru-American by multiple Pick-up Truck-Americans, GMC-Americans, Ford Explorer-Americans, and Jeep-Americans with multiple flipped birds and, lipreading the crackers, accusations of faggotry, head-light flashing horn-honking tailgaters, cars that would speed past me to pass then slam on brakes to go 30 in a 50, and survived what may or not but probably was an attempt - at minimum a threat - to run me off the road. United Reich of Assholostan upon us. The coordinated and combined shitlord psyops to use our enshittification to render vicious assholes more sadistically vicious and to use *their* intense and joyful assholification in service of our (and their) further enshittification terrifyingly successful. How many times can I paraphrase that in tablets, much less here? 

Words: I'm failing them more than they are failing me though they are failing me. Time for another canvas-hiatus in order that I don't lose what words say to and for me too soon: it's inevitable, but it doesn't have to be now. I'm incapable of ceasing gridding. Play this loud

Macquarie's 2024 WOTY is "enshittification"
"November 25, 2024, will be remembered in American history as the day the constitutional rule that no individual is above the law was ended"
☝	"Donald Trump’s real reason for running for re-election in 2024 was to stay out of prison. He knew that only a return to the White House would prevent him standing trial for initiating the January 6 insurrection, and standing trial for the theft of top secret documents. Conviction in either case would mean he would end his days as a convicted felon, quite possibly dying in prison"						☝
☝	"This is the worst defeat of the forces of democracy in the history of this country. Two men are solely responsible for this outcome: President Joseph R. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland"						☝
"The Man from Scranton will go down, as measured by the failures, dangers, and messes he leaves behind, as the worst-performing president in postwar American history"
How the US Media Helped the Biden Administration Distance Itself From the Horrors of Gaza
☟	"This must be the most unbelievable opinion piece in the past 50 years. So the international rules are only for one sort of people (Untermenschen) while superior races must be exempt from it. It should be framed and displayed!"						☟
Washington Post editorial board says ICC sanctions are for everybody but the United States of Assholes and its genocidal client state
☝	"Honestly, I have never, never seen in my life an article that openly, without dissimulation, calls for two distinct judicial systems: one for upper races, another for lower"						☝
☝	"Who Takes International Law Seriously?"						☝
Palestinians haunted by Israeli grave defilements and body theft
" Following its enabling of Israel's genocide, the redemption of the world lies in the mendacity that lies at the core of this genocide. The lie that some lives are more meaningful than others is exposed by how cheap and riddled with death Israeli lives have become"
Israel’s Revenge: An Interview with Rashid Khalidi
King of Falafel, a Palestinian-owned restaurant in New York, was fined $6,000 for the "Stop Genocide" sign on top of their store
Four Gentlemen Tour the Bekaa Valley
"Mission accomplished. The liberal establishment congratulates itself for crushing dissent against the Democratic Party-backed genocide in Palestine"
Anti-Progress, Breakdown, Reset
The Katechōn, the Man of Lawlessness, and the Most Important Election in Our Lives
Consultant Con				☞	"Why would voters be compelled by a campaign oriented around the uncritical defense of institutions that regularly fail them?"
Bill Clinton wants you to know it's all *your* fucking fault
"Resistance liberalism—from MSNBC to the Harris campaign—was a barely concealed scam that preyed on gullible but fundamentally decent people worried about the country. Like a traveling circus, they’ve now pulled up stakes—declared they were just kidding about fascism—and bounced"
Harris is considering running for president again in 2028, per Politico
☝	"I said before the election that the dumbest outcome, and therefore the likeliest, was a narrow Harris victory followed by Trump immediately launching a 2028 campaign; this, in retrospect, was a great failure on my part to imagine an even dumber and likelier outcome"						☝
Winning a presidential election makes any crimes you may have committed magically vanish
"I am trying to take public transportation more instead of driving. I am trying to eliminate my spending at Walmart and Amazon entirely. I am trying to use less plastic. I am trying to eat less meat and never get fast food. These tiny acts of resistance add up. I recommend you all try to do the same"
Amazon Is Busting Democracy, Not Just Unions
Maggie's		Trump Guitars hit with cease and desist from Gibson over use of Les Paul body shape
A BAND IN BERLIN					2024 Nov 25
A bleggalgaze, I promise not mine
Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears					{ feuilleton }'s
Why Nick Drake Deserves more than ‘Indiefication’
I've been reminded of (a) this great Mazzy Star song and (b) my crush on Hope Sandoval is kaboom forever

BUTCHERS

C.K. Williams

Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,

from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need.

Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,

and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,

where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation

as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.

Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?

It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.

Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—

Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.

2

But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely

that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal

within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,

aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.

Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec

your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!

Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,

we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher,

who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure

where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.

How Many Times Can I Use the Word Poem Without Sinking the Poem?

Saw eyedoc yesterday for every three months appointment, he insists I must have knife surgery this Fall to remove cataracts and cut canals into my eyeballs to relieve the glaucoma pressure, will not give me a needed new RX for glasses since it will be obsolete once surgery done - "You won't need to wear glasses," he uses to tell me eye surgery is a GOOD thing - and he doesn't want me wasting hundreds of dollars on glasses I'll use for but four months, as always I can make a fine fucking metaphor out of anything, I'm no way emotionally prepared for eye surgery. He did prescribe a new eyedrop he said will help temporarily with the glaucoma, I was reminded of the below, from 2018:




You know, if you're gleefully, gloatingly selling stolen land perhaps you shouldn't do it from a house of worship (thereby associating your religion with your thievery) unless your soul (sic) goal is to provoke then attack the people whose land you stole that are protesting you stole their land. Observe the people claiming to represent your values delight in attacking the people whose land was stolen and draw the correct conclusion that no one who seeks power and then claims to represent your values gives a flying fuck about your values beyond reminding you of your duty to vote for the person who doesn't give a flying fuck about your values

Yes, blogger-coding devolving daily into skeevier and skeevier. Yes, I haven't painted in ten days, I will make the two week hiatus I imposed. No, the below is not new, it too is from 2018, yes it reminds me I haven't used watercolor in months and I haven't used my handwriting in years except in tablet. No, I will not watch the debate between the diapered fucks jacked up on stimulants. Yes, my soul-deep loathing of those who claim to represent my values who don't give a flying fuck about my values trumps (sic) my scathing contempt for those who seek power and who claim to represent the values of crackers and christers 

My mother was born ninety years ago today

I fully restocked watercolor blocks, acrylic ink, and clear elmer's glue in days before planned hiatus, in 2018 if I'd told me in 2024 I'd be painting with acrylic ink and clear elmer's glue instead of not only watercolor but only the primary colors I'd have been righteously indignant at the accusation. I can make a fine fucking metaphor out of anything, my unsecret useless superpower. Yes, I will paint again. No, I will not.

Hope Sandoval turned 58 yesterday, I binged, hear:

Our Rulers Are Literally Driving Us Crazy
⬆	Someone for years has been telling you three times we are being reprogrammed						⬆
Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics
"apparently it's antisemitic to say Israel represents all Jews AND antisemitic to say it doesn't"
South Africa’s case against Israel
"Israeli Official Describes Secret Government Bid to Cement Control of West Bank"
The Collapse of Zionism					Long genocide
"After the Red Crescent received permission to go save 6 year old Hind… the IDF drove a tank to the location and shot over 350 bullets into the car… Then when the Red Crescent arrived they shelled the ambulance"
Of Course Israel Makes Jews Less Safe
The U.S. power structure is blindly dedicated to Israel
"Hosting colonial land theft events inside synagogues is a Western imperialist tactic to normalize the white supremacist ideology of Zionism by intertwining it with the religious identity of Judaism and then portraying anyone who protests imperialism as "antisemitic."
When Did Everything Become "Disinformation"?
Corporate Media in the Age of Fascist Politics: Firewalls of Ignorance and Disappearance
"Dear American trans community: every “if you don’t vote Biden, you don’t care about LGBT people” shitlib is quite literally your enemy, and everything the UK’s Labour Party is doing now is foreshadowing how ready they are to throw you under the bus next"
Marxist interpretation as a vocation
The Crackdown on Campus Protests is Just Beginning
Today in what you already knew: the number two goal of zionists is to create the maximum number of antisemites
What nuclear annihilation could look like
Today in what you already knew: "Israeli documents show expansive government effort to shape US discourse around Gaza war"
Today in what you already knew: Law enforcement is spying on thousands of Americans’ mail
Today in what you already knew: "This man is disturbed, but you need to listen to his rantings and understand that these asinine, racist, violent fantasies are at the beating heart of a political movement that has the support of the country’s wealth class as they seek to dismantle democracy"
Agreeing to our harm				WAR CRIMINALS
Orange cat drinking orange juice, or: what to do with the link on the grid when it's owner deletes it after I've linked the other thirty-nine links and fuck if I'm starting over
The rural western Pennsylvania town my father grew up in was dying when I was a child 60 years ago
Synthetic progressive				Sudan starves
"Do you know anyone who works in the NBA, or any journalists who cover the NBA? You should see if they know about how the owner of the Detroit Pistons makes money from some of the poorest families in the U.S"
'Draft Notice’ from the Shop of Horrors
Students can't get free lunch at school but a helmetball stadium renovation of shitlords? Fuck yeah
Why Are Teachers Funding Billionaires Private Jets?
What is a supermarket					Maggie's
The mysterious tyranny of baby names
{ feuilleton }'s			GNOSEOLOGY/GNOSIOLOGY
Alice Notley: Recent Reviews, Interviews, and New Books
Auden's Elegies of Exile				ships...		43 years ago. I was 21. The fuck am I old
John Barth and the Literature of Rectification
Who isn't going to see Jesus & Mary Chain / Psychedelic Furs with me in DC October 6?
Middle of a Clark Coolidge binge in particular and his collection *Poet* in particular this last month

[HOW MANY TIMES CAN I USE THE WORD]

Clark Coolidge

How many times can I use the word
poem without sinking the poem?
how many variables can coexist?
worry more about the automatic
cancelling device      get on with it!
this is not a skill set

I Called You But I Guess I Forgot Your Name

RIP David Roback, I love Rain Parade and LOVE! Mazzy Star (and the Clay Allison/Opal it was before Mazzy Star), damn, more

Or an Assassin Bug Squatting Over Us

• Too tired to read and staring at wittertay on my pleapay onephay to stay awake for not here
• I see Sanders must be leading in both party's internal polling so wetworked Bernie ordered
• Nothing raises Sanders more in my esteem than everybody who I hate hating him 
• UPDATE! I got Doctor Sevrin ears
• (it's a new flavor of my seething, seasoned by what won't be here of course but more by the abolition of Kayfabe by fucks fuckers and fuckees and simultaneous enforcement of Kayfabe for anyone fucks fuckers and fuckees hate, an old song, true, I know the lyrics by heart, bark)
• puts my favorite Cohen song in my head every time, Sanders assassins will interview with a celebrating Hannity on air, neerapodesta office parties everywhere

• Good news of collapse.
• Isolationism as slur.
• Power versus the press.
• My favorite activity in the world is going to make me horribly sick if not kill me.
• The heatwave and nightlife politics
• >> (massize) Deleted Bleggalgaze (yes, I did play the same Wire song two posts in a row on purpose)<<
• Maggie's weekly links. 
• Why he still reads.
• Ineffable but fake frontier.
• Why he does and doesn't blog.
• Madcap vidcrap recap. 
• UPDATE: Kavan's *Ice*
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• UPDATE: a little dizzy
• Living post, as in, it's done or it's not, just like my days
• UPDATE: Seven notarikon poems
• Twelve heart-breaking sounds that will remain when there is no heart to break for them.

                                
SELECTED RECENT AND NEW ERRORS

Dean Young

My books are full of mistakes

but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out

as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt

the new kid caught his arm in.

Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred

legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office

with an ignored view of the river

pretending to be asleep, pretending

to have insight into its muddy self.

You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor,

try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm

in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know

it’s the quickness of its death that reveals

the quality of the product, its proof.

I don’t know what I’m talking about either.

Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself

I’ve got these words that mean completely

different things inside myself

and it’s tearing me apart?

My errors are even bigger than that.

You start taking down the walls of your house,

sooner or later it’ll collapse

but not before you can walk around

with your eyes closed, rolled backwards

and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker

and your own damn self hanging there.

Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight

in snow that lasts about twenty minutes

longer than a life held together

by the twisted silver baling wire

of deception and stealth.

But I ain’t confessing nothing.

On mornings when I hope you forget my name,

I walk through the high wet weeds

that don’t have names either.

I do not remember the word dew.

I do not remember what I told you

with your ear in my teeth.

Further and further into the weeds.

We have absolutely no proof

god isn’t an insect

rubbing her hind legs together to sing.

Or boring into us like a yellow jacket

into a fallen, overripe pear.

Or an assassin bug squatting over us,

shoving a proboscis right through

our breast plate then sipping.

How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

The Ruined and Vacant Sheets

• The writing block that's not a writing block, I blame seeing a movie.
• I bought Earthgirl a $100 gift card (don't 
• worry, she doesn't read this shitty blog, if she finds out 
• you told her) to Bethesda Row Cinema and will tell her if we go to three movies the two of us I'll buy her another.
• I thought I'd read Eliot's Daniel Deronda before but no (I 
• read Adam Bede, I don't remember a single scene, sentence, image about Adam Bede, the novel, a major Murnane theme, recall reading a novel, remember nothing about the novel).
• I'm a hundred pages in and happy when suddenly here is Mallinger Grandcourt, I 
• guarantee after one chapter of the fucksmug (and
• then there's Gwendolyn) he 
• is an asshole supreme
• whose first name will make me smile as only one person can vouch (unless apathy is a disease - origin of the maxim directly related).
• Novels, I can read Eliot, I can read Murnane, gonna try to read McElroy's cinderblock, but...
• I know why I'm afraid of movies.
• I have never had a writing block that worried me less, strange times, a writing block not a writing block.
• I still think often, daily recently, about Coover's Brunists, Wrath of, that was, um, cinematic...

HAPPY OBLIVION

FRANZ WRIGHT

It circles awhile, I suppose, until at last
having found nothing green
it returns.

The holy dove of tongues on fire released -

The birthday cake, the ruined and vacant
sheets, the pilot lost
in a vast dopamine cloud.

Closed eyes
and lips that open hovering
on the verge of speech, the final

breath, also known as the infinite
hours which proceeded the first,
at last released.

emitting cat-calls as heretofore -

• Olive and Stanley at door, MomCat and Nap at my feet, last night.
• Thanks to Beloveds and friends who made it to Earthgirl's show's reception Sunday past.
• The planet is pissed and wants you outta here.
• A question.
• A rhetorical question.
• How to plot your takeover.
• Bleating doom daily! The fuck?
• There is a new Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, gonna burn any giftmas cards on it.
• The Scribbling Women Complex.
• Po(e).
• Marianne Moore was born 130 years ago today.
• Thanks to Beloveds and friends who groaned at my wooden cairn-maker pun at the show.

A GRAVEYARD

Marianne Moore

Man, looking into the sea—

taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to yourself—

it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing

but you cannot stand in the middle of this:

the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.

The firs stand in a procession—each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top—

reserved as their contours, saying nothing;

repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;

the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.

There are others besides you who have worn that look—

whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them

for their bones have not lasted;

men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,

and row quickly away—the blades of the oars   

moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death.

The wrinkles progress upon themselves in a phalanx—beautiful under networks of foam,

and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;

the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore—

the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them

and the ocean, under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys,

advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink—

in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.

The Bold, Enduring Menace of Courtship Is Upon Us Like the Plague, and None of Us Can Say What Trouble Will Be Precipitated Once It Had Its Way with Us

• New Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions. Love still.
• If anyone is very Vile, I'd love a tutorial.
• Heightened awareness/to Fall.
• Why would the Clinton's buy their third million dollar house late September 2016?
• No one will remember by Sunday and my thinking Geez, bad optics that is stupid.
• A standard begrudging less-shittiest argument for Clinton. 
• A standard hectoring less-shittiest argument for Clinton. 
• Psst - Clinton's shittiness, if you left us the fuck alone - we might - might - probably not but might - be able to swallow viz Angry White Jesus, but you motherfucking Hillaryite Hectors do almost as much damage to Clinton as Clinton herself. If you truly support Clinton, do her a major favor and shut the fuck up. 
• What? No. I'm not going to watch the debate.
• The minute Trump wins Hillary Clinton starts her 2020 bid. For a few minutes I entertained the possibility that a Trump win could spark a genuine Leftist movement (by which I mean a move back towards a New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party) - and then I laughed at myself.

• Gass on grasshoppers - and you and me and him. Sorry, meant to scan that at work yesterday, had to take a photo this morning. Read it - out load if you can - anyway.
• Now - this moment in time - is the time to read Gass' long meditation on the small petty personal evils that animate and motivate each of us. If I like you, and you ask nice, I'll send you a copy of The Tunnel, but not today - payday is next Friday.
• Ted Cruz thinks Trump is going to win.
• Alan Lichtman, who has correctly predicted (not that it's that hard, 2000 Florida excepted) all POTUS correctly since 1984, says Trump is going to win.
• I prefer to think of it as Clinton is going to lose. Fair or not, earned or not, she is the walking totemof a shitty status quo.
• Enabligatory behavior.
• American pussydom.
• This Week in Water. Each time I post one I look at the word water until my still goes, The fuck?
• How the financing of college sucks. The stories I can't tell. 
• Please tell Ed you want him to post Gravity's Rainbow two pages a day with annotations. Hurry.
• The new Nick Cave - down below the Ashbery - is growing on me.
• New Leonard Cohen, whose music I don't love (I do love this song) but dig and respect:

LEAVE THE HAND IN

John Ashbery

Furthermore, Mr. Tuttle used to have to run in the streets.   

Now, each time friendship happens, they’re fully booked.   

Sporting with amaryllis in the shade is all fine and good,   

but when your sparring partner gets there first   

you wonder if it was all worth it. “Yes, why do it?”   

I’m on hold. It will take quite a lot for this music   

to grow on me. I meant no harm. I’ve helped him   

from getting stuck before. Dumb thing. All my appetites are friendly.   

Children too are free to go and come as they please.   

I ask you only to choose between us, then shut down this election.   

But don’t reveal too much of your hand at any given time.   

Then up and pipes the major, leave the hand in,   

or change the vows. The bold, enduring menace of courtship is upon us   

like the plague, and none of us can say what trouble   

will be precipitated once it has had its way with us.   

Our home is marshland. After dinner was wraparound.   

You got a tender little look at it.   

Outside, it never did turn golden.