Like a Downhill Brake-Burned Freight Train Full of Pig-Iron

Earthgirl climbing Mt Monadnock in sw New Hampshire. Tough but fun but plagued by summer campers, as in kids and early teens, all screaming at top of voices. Recommended hike is up the White Dot trail and down the White Cross, but White Dot full of said campers so we went up the White Cross and down the White Dot and learned why the recommendation is up the White Dot, down the White Cross. I can go up steep all freaking day long - I like uphill, lots - but down the White Dot, ouchy. My knees are old.

Typing now (7am Friday) in Lincoln New Hampshire in middle of White Mountains. This is true - I thought the hotel was in Littleton NH, twenty miles to north, and overshot Lincoln, luckily - we drove I-93 first north then south through Franconia Notch, best stretch of interstate I've ever driven. We're here and staying here until we head for Acadia tomorrow afternoon.

Today, Cannon Mountain loop then Flume Gorge. I would like to climb a Presidential, I don't think my knees can take descending a Presidential. I can go uphill all day, it's down that's hard.

Songs from yesterday's drive.





  
AND STILL IT COMES

Thomas Lux

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train

full of pig iron ingots, full of lead

life-size statues of Richard Nixon,

like an avalanche of smoke and black fog

lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips

of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal,

remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back,

faster when you turn to face it,

like a fine rain, then colder showers,

then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail,

fist-size, then jagged

laser, shrapnel hail

thudding and tearing like footsteps

of drunk gods or fathers; it comes

polite, loutish, assured, suave,

breathing through its mouth

(which is a hole eaten by a cave),

it comes like an elephant annoyed,

like a black mamba terrified, it slides

down the valley, grease on grease,

like fire eating birds’ nests,

like fire melting the fuzz

off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute

and gorging, never

to cease, insatiable, gorging

and mute.
   

Refuse Refuge Refuse

• I knew Sunday yesterday was Meredith Monk's birthday. 75 this year.
• I prepared the birthday post Sunday night - mostly canned like most the birthday cards because why paraphrase myself, some small new though - then, Monday morning, didn't want to post.
• She's a refuge I go to. I tried on the way to work. Helped. Still didn't post.
• I listened to her last night, didn't write why I didn't post her card yesterday.
• I tweeted Vocal Frier mid-afternoon yesterday re: Monk's birthday: Hey @vocalfrier today in (sic) Meredith Monk's 75th birthday (in case you know anyone who has a radio show tonight at seven that specializes in vocal music).
• and he responded I may know someone in that situation, with a tendency to celebrate Ms. Monk's work.
• and he wasn't lying. Here's an hour of Meredith Monk, last night on Vocal Fry.
• On show message board (and Dan on mic-breaks): people just happy it wasn't an RIP show.

Theme Song January 24 2017

Seventy-Four Today

High Egoslavian Holy Day. Much more here.

Instead of Instead

Building Bonfires Something Like Eyelashes

Let me explain. I promised Loved Ones I'd vote on issues/people important to them. I got to polling station, the line is at an hour. I brought a book but too distracting to read, I put in earbuds and put iPhone on shuffle and decided whoever was in ears when I cast my ballot would be my write-in choice for POTUS. Thirty seconds earlier it'd been Meredith Monk, two minutes later it'd been Julie Doiron, but this was in my ears when I voted:

• UPDATE! Planet tells me posting that photo of the ballot is illegal. Come and get me, Copper.
• I did not cause HRC to lose Maryland.
• I thought HRC would win, by less than 2012 Obama, but win. I'm surprised, but not shocked.
• I underestimated how many white women would break for Trump. And I overestimated how much gender would be the tribal affiliation to, um, trump.
• It is entirely possible to hold the position that Hillary Clinton is the most unfairly maligned and attacked candidate of our lifetimes AND to hold the position she's the stupidest, shittiest campaigner ever.
• Loved ones and friends and colleagues are distraught, so
• HRC's autopsy can start tomorrow or whenever.
• Though this: this isn't Comey, this isn't wikileaks, this isn't BernieBros, this isn't Jill Stein, this is HRC's and DNC's alone.

Anne Sexton, born 88 years ago today:

Cassandras Warning of Poison in the White Bread

• Yesterday! ▲ The Bowl. Today, Acadia and St Sauveur mountains.
• Here is the sublede to the top story in the Washington Post at 6:27 AM EDT August 5 2016: To expand its outreach to potential GOP converts who find they can no longer stomach Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a simple message: Even if you don't like her, choosing the Democratic nominee is moral and patriotic. Disclosure: the Washington Post wants me to pay to read it, and fuck that, so I don't know what's in the story.
• Moral and patriotic. Think about that.
• I urge Hillaryites doing victory dances to keep dancing. Taunt Ba'al, the amoral fucks. 
• Anatomy of a neoliberal racist killing machine. 
• Hillary is campaigning - wants to be known as, desires to be (and which is worse, that she is or that she isn't and cynically campaigns as) a neoliberal racist killing machine?
• How Trump could win and why.
• Skinks for Rump: This is the excellent irony of Milo and the twinks for Daddy Trump. These little blond racist shitbirds have got it in their heads that they can help present him as a figure of phallic power, when in reality he—and they—become even more figures of fun. (Interestingly, by the way, the Classical world considered both impotence and well-endowed-ness to be pretty much equally hilarious and unmanly.) They are a punchline that comes to life and imagines itself as the comedian.
• The weird cynicism of using children to back up your political opinion.
• ::: wood s lot ::: has posted only twice since June. It's one of my favorite and most invaluable blogs I know. Mark usually takes a couple of weeks off in the summer, but... here's sending out an insignificant beacon.
• What I am buying me for my birthday.  
• I've been listening to all my Meredith Monk on drive-arounds and Earthgirl has let me, so bless her.
• So, Elkin. (Thanks, Ed, for bumping me back to an old lover.) Here is quintessential Elkin, a description of guests past on Dick Gibson's overnight talk show: the lists, the logorrhea (his word), the adjectives and adverbs, the rhythm, the sentences, the working of vowels and phonemes. Read it out loud. I dare you. The paragraph begins: No, he knew little about his listeners. They were not even mysterious; they were there, but distant as the Sioux. He knew more

How Pleasant to Spend One's Vacation en la Casa de Popeye

From the little canoe/kayak dock in the backyard of the house ▲ we're staying in Tremont Maine. Had dinner last night at what the owners of the house call a local institution, a lobster pound. The soundtrack was patriotic hymns and Herb Alpert singles. Today is explore Acadia and tonight to plan the longer day hikes.

This is Earthgirl and my first vacation without Planet in 24 years. The last one Planet was alive, barely two months existing (and giving Earthgirl constant pregnancy queasiness). Earthgirl had rented a cabin near Deep Creek Lake in Garrett County Maryland. The ad and brochure promised a house in the condition of the one I'm sitting in now. It was a dim, dingy, only two electric sockets working, septic tank stank dump. That vacation sucked. Until I walked in the door of of this house that was what I was expecting, so yay! this vacation is already better than that one.

This morning at five ▼ from the bedroom window:

• We bought coffee to grind at the hippie grocery in Ellsworth (along with local miso and kimchi and local veggie burgers - the clerk demanded we try them, she assures us they're the best ever and that she does not get a commission) and I've figured out the coffeemaker here (if I made it a bit too strong) and I'm looking at the lake and drinking coffee and here, the links I have not yet attempted to not look for and read and then, if I think them useful, give you, and will not begin to pretend to try to not look for, provided below. If they're not here per usual in days to come it's because I'm elsewhere, not sitting at the dining room table, that is, any absence will not be a self-imposed moral stance or fake attempt at a disconnection with the world. 
• Jane Sanders on his husband Bernie.
• More terrifying than anything coming out of the Trump camp.
• The worse aspect of Lesser Evilism.
• I'm not with her because I'm petty.
• One big corporate bribe.
• Everything is broken.
• Three songs on our drives yesterday that came up on my iTunes shuffle:

• Alone together.
• This Week in Water. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Anthony Hecht's nobility. I witnessed the end of Hecht's Georgetown years - perhaps his most hated enemy was beloved L of Thursday Night Pints (I was L's student when I was friends with Hecht and did not become L's friend - and Thursday Night Pints did not begin) until Hecht had left Georgetown, so I only heard L's side in detail long after the fact). Those battles aren't fought any longer; Hecht's side lost.
• A gigantic Happy Birthday William Gass post.
• The function of authority in poetry. 
• About my very tortured friend Peter.
• Tomorrow is a double High Egoslavian Holy Day, so I know what tomorrow's posts will be.

FARM IMPLEMENTS AND RUTABAGAS IN A LANDSCAPE

John Ashbery

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,   

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,

From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant   

To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched

Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.   

“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder   

Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment

Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.   

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach   

When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”

But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder   

And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment   

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched

Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment

And all that it contains, myself and spinach

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched   

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”   

She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”

“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”   

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment

Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant

Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach

Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched

One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country

Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,   

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

Born Seventy-Three Years Ago Today

   
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Click for more. UPDATE! Also too! (h/t Alexyvee Alarum!)

It Comes to the Monk in His Cell

Meredith Monk is 72 today. I understand why Earthgirl won't let me play most of what what she doesn't want to hear on our roads trips, but I don't get the shrieks of TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF! for Meredith Monk. Swans, yes, Karkowski, yes, but Monk is beautiful....

Blessed Serendipity, this is what I wrote for last year's Meredith Monk birthday post

Meredith Monk will be 71 tomorrow. This is true: the above youtube of Monk's Possibility of Destruction was meant to be posted alone (as in not here) at BLCKDGRDXLD just now to consecrate BLCKDGRDXLD as home blog in my mind if not in practice. This post is there now too (where it looks excellent) but consecration need wait. BLCKDGRD and BLCKDGRDXLD are on different google accounts for reasons pertaining to my technical ineptitude and the blogtrauma of the domain name renewal, I wanted a back-up blog on a different account in case BLCKDGRD's account was lost, dropped, or somehow compromised through either my digital clumsiness or google's bulldozering of clients while paving new profits. I like what I do here, I don't want to lose it, I go back for songs and poems. On my laptop I run BLCKDGRD on Firefox and BLCKDGRDXLD on Chrome so I can keep both accounts open simultaneously as I move back and forth. I need to youtube in Firefox since my youtube account is on the same log-in as my BLCKDGRD account, I opened what I thought was a new post at BLCKDGRDXLD, pasted the youtube, plunged Publish, oops. Have another piece.

So I'm a moron, but this shit fascinates me, is one of this shitty blog's primary themes and probably most consistent echo, as is the theme that I am the only one who finds this shit fascinating, as is the theme that I am a moron. I realize the cycle; I understand some of the reasons, the feeding of the reasons has always worked, worked as well as the MomCat and Napoleon Emergency Alert Systems always work (which are 24 hours from being activated): shit comes home, then runs away from home again. For instance, here is yesterday's post at the latest new place:

I am working my way through this tray of pens

 

to cull the living from the dead.
I am stomping the dead pens' heads into paper to give the pen
one appeal for clemency. There will not be a second trial.
When ink this color survived I will not throw it out though I will not use it.
I would buy packages of Sarasa pens (you who knew I would use the phrase
Sarasa pens again because perennial biennial semiannual centennial)
when I had too many Sarasa pens. This dark green in a pack of multicolors:
blacks, grays, dark blues, blues, maroons, dark greens are harvested.
Here's a Pilot black pen, see, it's wetter, thicker,
I'm not surprised it survived.
(Here I need a font of fading to death blue ink....) This maroon
Sarasa, the color of VNTY'SGRVYRD in most posts but this one.
The hiring committee committed the predictable. Plus the maroon pen just died.
In a national search there was not one candidate I could imagine advocating for hire.
Six pens out of thirty still dispense ink. I will drain each of life before buying more.

See? So: I want to post this here. It's like chancing a Monk when Earthgirl's in the car.

 

• Air of resignation.
• Facts, values, dark beer: As for me—well, all things considered, I find that being alive beats the stuffing out of the alternative, and that’s true even though I live in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress show every sign of grinding to a halt in the near future, and in which warfare, injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs are matters of common experience. The notion that life has to justify itself to me seems, if I may be frank, faintly silly, and so does the comparable claim that I have to justify my existence to it, or to anyone else. Here I am; I did not make the world; quite the contrary, the world made me, and put me in the irreducibly personal situation in which I find myself. Given that I’m here, where and when I happen to be, there are any number of things that I can choose to do, or not do; and it so happens that one of the things I choose to do is to prepare, and help others prepare, for the long decline of industrial civilization and the coming of the dark age that will follow it.
• Inside the world's most powerful terrorist organization!
• President Warren: to my way of thinking, a randpaul/lizzy campaign would be a renaissance of american political discourse. both of them say something, which has to be the starting point. hillary clinton says nothing and means nothing and, in public space, is nothing. and obviously warren could beat rand on a given november day, though rand is a surprisingly good politician and on another november day might beat her. (rand i think, has a less plausible road to the rep nomination than warren to the dem.) i like her against christie too, though i don't think christie will be the nominee. she makes a good contrast in a number of ways to jeb bush, whereas jeb and hillary are indistinguishable. 
• The die is cat.
• Marilynne Robinson redux.
• Donald Antrim, for those of you who do.
• Ashbery and the phenomenology of waiting.
• Yes, the Jane Kenyon poem below selected in part today for the obvious line used in this shitty post's title though that is a minor reason it is the poem posted most often to this shitty blog.

  

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*

*

HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Seventy-One Today

Meredith Monk is 71 today. I'm rebumping the top two pieces and oops from last night (the original oops here now deleted - some people saw it - kept there):

Meredith Monk will be 71 tomorrow. This is true: the above youtube of Monk's Possibility of Destruction was meant to be posted alone (as in not here) at BLCKDGRDXLD just now to consecrate BLCKDGRDXLD as home blog in my mind if not in practice. This post is there now too (where it looks excellent) but consecration need wait. BLCKDGRD and BLCKDGRDXLD are on different google accounts for reasons pertaining to my technical ineptitude and the blogtrauma of the domain name renewal, I wanted a back-up blog on a different account in case BLCKDGRD's account was lost, dropped, or somehow compromised through either my digital clumsiness or google's bulldozering of clients while paving new profits. I like what I do here, I don't want to lose it, I go back for songs and poems. On my laptop I run BLCKDGRD on Firefox and BLCKDGRDXLD on Chrome so I can keep both accounts open simultaneously as I move back and forth. I need to youtube in Firefox since my youtube account is on the same log-in as my BLCKDGRD account, I opened what I thought was a new post at BLCKDGRDXLD, pasted the youtube, plunged Publish, oops. Have another piece.







And adding these pieces:

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("Mere Protocol"? - More Like a Second Backbone!)

• Holyfuck, listen to my new obsession. 
• Aesthetics, morality, politics, and disaster.
• The Kafkaesque world of data mining.
• Auto-pilot! 
• Sirota brings the duh.
• Hillarian inevitability: campaign against Obama's legacy from the right. Of course. And with that I hearby proclaim I suspend the use of the terms Hillarian inevitably, motherfucking Clinton, and motherfucking Clintons (which means they won't be mentioned at all) from this blog NOT because those terms aren't completely valid but because they are (though I allow myself this one last Fuck the Clintons, the two of them the perfect symbol for all that's fucked in American politics).
• Should be easy until 2016, then, probably not so much, though there's an obvious way to guarantee there's not talk of them in 2016 on this blog, executed on my end.

• Reminder (to me): field-recordings, music, poems, aargh-free links if links at all, one weekend post, tomorrow.
• BRT!
• CCT!
• Did you know new water-heaters cost $2600? It's true!
• Wolfson's has closed! (h/t SeatSix). I mean, it's been years since I was inside, but there's always been a Wolfson's on Diamond Avenue.
• Scharpling's show on Tuesday night's on WFMU never worked for me - I don't want to hear talk on the radio - but news of his retiring Best Show is noteworthy if for no other reason that it, by far, raised the most money during marathons.
• Fabio played an hour-and-a-half tribute to Lou Reed yesterday, but listen to the show for the two Meredith Monk pieces.
• Fifteen problems.
• Sebald, for those of you who do. I confess I have not felt compelled to pick up another since finishing Austerlitz, though that's more a matter of enthusiasm for other stuff than never-minding Sebald.
• Joyce Carol Oates v Robert Frost.
• Auden and ecopoetry.
• In Evidence: 3.
• New Eno interview.

INTELLIGENCE

Tom Sleigh

Wiretaps and tapes, concealed

bugs and mikes,

                           intercepted letters

full of passionate declarations, contradictory

intelligence—

                           how attached he’d grown

to the subject’s documents, revising and rearranging

the influx of intelligence

with a sentiment, he acknowledged, almost

                           like love: he felt

the cool gray eyes of his superiors

trained on him, rebuking him

                           for swerving, for letting

himself go—such tender obsession

occasioned by the file!

                           Not quite the professional style

he or the Agency expected…

But such official loyalties

                           seemed mere protocol to this!—

what was wrong with him,

                           he wondered, that he construed

the documents to make the subject

seem a hero,

                           a bastard whose sole patrimony

was a pair of shoes and a rusted sword

left by an unknown father beneath a stone?

And yet his exploits in the tabloids,

the headlines screaming,

SCOURGE OF MONSTERS STRIKES AGAIN!

HERO FOUNDS REPUBLIC

                           were these heroic

different in kind from the rumors,

unverified,

                           of a rape, a murder?

—But to have met undisguised the devouring monster!

To have escaped the twisting tunnels of the maze…

On balance, for such a life,

                           the hero’s reputation wasn’t bad:

think of the opportunities for evil

                           a man of such qualities must have had!

How well he knew him—an essential innocence

that followed impulse, blind

to protocol, not noticeably more kind

                           than he was cruel.

But to stamp Case Closed and cease

                           gathering intelligence,

to give the hero up, almost, he admitted,

like a lover…:

                           such limits the hero

unknowingly transgressed!

And the Agency, cold-blooded where

                           limits were concerned (“mere protocol”?—

more like a second backbone!), committed

                           to keeping order, could not afford

such sentiments—the Chief of Security

felt an awful pang: that the work of intelligence

                           should lead to this…

He leaned back in his chair and sighed:

                           a forged genealogy certifying

that the hero’s father was a king; a mutual

assistance pact

                           to aid in taking back the usurped crown:

he could see them now, the wind

blowing lightly, the two of them sweating

as they climbed the cliff, discussing

                           the terms, exchanging information,

intelligence—

                           how would his own face look

staring down across the sea

                           as he gestured earnestly toward

some island, saying,

                           “According to our sources,

the tax revenues…”

                           And then, edging

the hero closer to the cliff, pointing

                           out the harbor, he’d push.

words reach and visually fail to tie audibly retire the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of turning aside remind

   
Yesterday morning on 270 south, on the curve to the left at the split at the spur, the Matrix hit 200K miles. I always liked the car's dashboard looks like a United uniform. The transmission is starting to go, and I'll not sink more than a few hundred dollars into a repair, and the CD player has been busted the last 50K miles and Dvorak's American Suite was what was on WETA at the time, but I gassed it up and Jiffy Lubed it yesterday, it's been an exceptionally reliable car needing just standard maintenance, I feel an obligation to run it into the ground, or at least sensible abandonment.

• More songs for long quiet solo drives over mountains.
• Another person asks, Does Obama think we're stupid?
• Obama on imperial power and total surveillance: If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day,” Obama said, “and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.
• So it's come to this: two links from Politico. Thanks, Obama.
• The surveillance is not about terrorism.
• Police state tango.
• On Lavabit.
• Fine print as capitalism's surrealist masterpiece.
• Privilege and the rhetoric of austerity.
• Maggie's links of the week.

• I walked into the living room yesterday, Planet and Earthgirl are watching some TV show, Captain Janeway is undercover as a old fat Russian inmate in a California prison. No sign of Seven of Nine or Jameway's First Officer Chipotle.
• Potomac drowning machine.
• Watkins Mill interchange!
• { feuilleton }'s links of the week.
• A Language.
• Album - A Runthru.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Celan and Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Malone Dies.
• In the marvelous dimension.
• Seven pieces of HOLYFUCK! 

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

Now the Summer Air Exerts Its Syrupy Drag and the Half-Dark City Under the Strict Surveillance of Quotation Marks

• That's today's David Thomas song, one a day for month of June.
• Lookit, I'm gonna talk through links today, I simultaneously feel incredibly powerful FUCK YOUS and indescribably sad fuck its.
• The surveillance state and the rise of Ronald Reagan.
• Blarney!
• Why Snowden's a hero. OK, I'm gonna say something - Let's say for the sake of argument that Snowden's act was heroic: he just advanced Power's timetable of how much shit people will eat and like it in the larger scheme of feeding people shit and not caring whether people like it. Irony sucks, right?
• A vote for hero.
• Ellsberg votes hero. He was paid by the Koch brothers to say it, but...
• Do the people who scream, But he broke his oath realize the flipside to the coin is He was just following orders?
• The ecstasy of being told what to do.
• Vile, evil Dianne Feinstein, thank you for your invaluable assistance in my apostasies, for teaching the truth of who really is .06% more shitty, though to be fair, she far out-shits that marker. Motherfucking Democrats.
• vicious and grotesquely fallacious.
• Has anyone asked Ben Cardin (D-NSA) or Barbara Mikulski (D-NSA) what they think about this yet?
• Laura Poitras is a hero.
• Snowden and the snobbery of credential factory graduates.
• There are no accidents around here.
• Inside the United States.
• Cops.
• Photography is not a crime. Yet.
• Forgive me, I saw this headline, thought of Emily Litella.
• From apps to zombies?
• Commissioner Gordon has activated the Zombie Signal. Might have been answered as far as I know, I was answering to Serendipity.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Beautiful new Mark Kozelek song. 
• Monk!
• Scelsi!
• I was reminded of Kitchen & The Plastic Spoons.

"AN ARCHIVE OF CONFESSIONS, A GENEALOGY OF CONFESSIONS"

Joshua Clover

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark

City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off

From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.

In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin

The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in

Across the bluing evening. It’s the hour things get

To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.

Yikes. It’s fine to be here with you watching the great events

Without taking part, clinking our ice as they advance

Yet remain distant. Like the baker always about to understand

Idly sweeping up that he is the recurrence of Napoleon

In a baker’s life, always interrupted by the familiar notes

Of a childish song, “no more sleepy dreaming,” we float

Casually on the surface of the day, staring at the bottom,

Jotting in our daybooks, how beautiful, the armies of autumn. 

Thanks to Operation Memory Each of Us Woke Up in a Different Bed or Coffin, with a Different Partner Beside Him, in the Middle of a War That Had Never Been Declared

GAH! To be fair, I once liked My Morning Jacket before it ran out of idea (sic). And to be fair, see where it says Ryan Bingham? Some of the tours' shows (the one above is at Merriwether in July) it says Richard Thompson. Well, fuck me with multiple formats.

HEY! Earthgirl dumped me for our date this coming Saturday night to see Meredith Monk at Clarice Smith Center at University of Maryland. To be fair, I bought the tickets months ago and then didn't mention it until last Tuesday night, she made plans a month ago to take a dear friend out to dinner for her birthday. To be fair, Earthgirl screams at me to turn Meredith Monk off whenever I play Monk's music. All of which to say, I've got an extra ticket, I know Hamster's already booked (or he'd have a ticket already). Anyone?




  

• The Klown Quotient increases.
• A few words on Jacobin and Purity Cults.
• And a response.
• Biologist says we're fucked.
• We're fucked, part two.
• Surveillance state.
• I referenced Vic Davalillo in a tweet about last night's header.
• So, baseball: thank grace, the Nats' start is underwhelming I haven't been tempted beyond speculation to go to a game, so suck is Metro, 35K descending in mass into one narrow tunnel.
• But baseball: I remember when I was always at Memorial, then Camden Yards, when we rotisseried, I was obnoxiously pro-designated hitter, now, I see the potential, its inevitability if I toke baseball again tonight, I could fanatically and obnoxiously embrace the pitcher's spot batting. Because the National League is a better game of baseball, yes? Fine metaphors abound.
• I wanna be a poseur.
• A reminder about Newest Gag, over on Left Blogroll, every day in May a new site added, so far I've kept up, suggestions solicited.
• Worst kit ever?
• Insufferable pronouns.
• What happened to Literature?
• Lawless Pantoum.
• Speaking of GAH!
• Only assholes don't like the B-52s.
• Look, I don't hate Dylan, I get why Dylan is celebrated and honored even if I don't get the music, you just won't ever catch me listening. 
• Now, Wilco? Suck.
• Obscure Sound's Best New Stuff from April, with sound.
• Yes, I've posted the Lehman sestina before, (a) it was necessary for this post and (b) I like it.

OPERATION MEMORY

David Lehman

We were smoking some of this knockout weed when
Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed
Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred
With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle
Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs
And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.

We'd been drinking since early afternoon. I was loaded.
The doctor made me recite my name, rank, and serial number when
I woke up, sweating, in my civvies. All my friends had jobs
As professional liars, and most had partners who were good in bed.
What did I have? Just this feeling of always being in the middle
Of things, and the luck of looking younger than fifty.

At dawn I returned to draft headquarters. I was eighteen
And counting backwards. The interviewer asked one loaded
Question after another, such as why I often read the middle
Of novels, ignoring their beginnings and their ends. when
Had I decided to volunteer for intelligence work? "In bed
With a broad," I answered, with locker-room bravado. The truth was, jobs

Were scarce, and working on Operation Memory was better than no job
At all. Unamused, the judge looked at his watch. It was 1970
By the time he spoke. Recommending clemency, he ordered me to go to bed
At noon and practice my disappearing act. Someone must have loaded
The harmless gun on the wall in Act I when
I was asleep. And there I was, without an alibi, in the middle 

Of a journey down nameless, snow-covered streets, in the middle
Of a mystery--or a muddle. These were the jobs
That saved men's souls, or so I was told, but when
The orphans assembled for their annual reunion, ten
Years later, on the playing fields of Eton, each unloaded
A kit bag full of troubles, and smiled bravely, and went to bed.

Thanks to Operation Memory, each of us woke up in a different bed
Or coffin, with a different partner beside him, in the middle
Of a war that had never been declared. No one had time to load
His weapon or see to any of the dozen essential jobs
Preceding combat duty. And there I was, dodging bullets, merely one
In a million whose lucky number had come up. When

It happened, I was asleep in bed, and when I woke up,
It was over: I was 38, on the brink of middle age,
A succession of stupid jobs behind me, a loaded gun on my lap.

The Lean Monk-Copyist Who Scribes the Books Is Slate-Blue at His Fingertips This Steely Late-November Day in the Year 1000

I blog pseudonymously (though that may change, as may more, or not, negotiations proceed apace), have digital friendships with dozens of people of whom I've no idea of their lives, no idea if what they tell about their lives is true or false, and while I can't imagine falling in love with any of them, when they claim to be ill or in distress I believe them, I worry about them, I email them to offer them wishes and favors, so I'm not going to mock Monti Te'o if he's telling the truth and I'm not going to blast him if he's a troll. I will mock this: I find it deliciously ironic that Te'o played for Notre Dame, an institution (like the one I work at) that bases its identity on its imaginary friend Jesus. Linebackers and negative existentials. On "the story of the year." Fox trolling, trolling Fox. Presidential trolling. Things you might have missed. Gargoyles can't fly? Magruders dead. Storming the court. Winner, best shirt of 2012 (Trolling). Anthony's links of the week. On bitching about inauguration poets. Librarians of the twitterverse. Gaddis' JR. Mad lib elegy. Gould and Sibelius. Via Hamster (who did respond to the Hamster Signal and will be joining us for Yo La Tengo, as will, hopefully, a dude from Bawlmer, hon) - Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet? Strong maybe. Hamster's buying tickets! eighth blackbird playing Reich? Maybe maybe. Meredith Monk? Just bought tickets.




IMP

Albert Goldbarth

Fire isn’t allowed, for the sake of the books.

The lean monk-copyist who scribes the books is slate-blue at his fingertips

this steely late-November day in the year 1000. Brother Ambrosio

huffs some perfunctory warmth on his stiffening hands,

then bends again to his goat’s-horn of ink. For every line,

he believes, he’s forgiven a sin. And now he’s at his heavy

uncial letters, and will be for nine hours more,

until a slab of bread and a beet relieve his transcriptual ardor.

What he copies?—psalter, missal, hagiography:

the predetermined and sanctioned community passions

of a religious culture. Nothing like the twentieth century’s

prevalent kneejerk “self-expression.” Nothing like the priest,

excuse me: former priest, and former nun, on daytime talk TV,

who live, she tells us, in a “trinity of love” with the former

creator-of-tourist-ashtrays-out-of-catfish-heads. This is,

she insists, the final and jubilant stage of a lifelong “quest

to feel belongingness” initiated thirty years before

by parents skittering cross-country with the military: they

were wholly rootless, and so she grew up “unable to commit.” The following day,

a man confesses to pedophilia because of a lesbian aunt.

A woman says she robbed the Sack-N-Save of $13.42

“because of what they’re dumping in the water supply, it makes me

go all freaky.” Steve was bounced out from The Chicken Shack

“because I’m Scandinavian.” The culture

of blame is so completely exterior in its search for cause,

some days I wake to think I’ll find most people laboring

under the weight of sci-fi-style mind parasites, like fleshy turbans

spewing in, and feeding off, their brain blood. This (by “this”

I mean of course a recognition of the magic of objective correlative

boppin’ about in the spotlight) is, to some length,

understandable: you can’t beat the miniscule carry-along

convenience of a silicon chip invisibly set in something,

BUT for sheer persuasive visual power, that can’t touch

a 1940s generating plant, its giant Alcatrazian shape

against the sky, and the enormous wrestling electrical crackles

snaking its rooftop pylon. In the scriptorium, even

—such an isolated unit of human endeavor, its limited range

of reactions surely is pure—when Brother Ambrosio

nods off, sleepy in his long day’s long eighth hour

of thickly nibbed and careful letters, he knows

it’s imps in league with Satan that keep pulling down his eyelids.

If in scratching his flea-measled thigh he spills

a hand’s-expanse of ink across the vellum page, the fleas

are tiny devils on a guerilla mission from Hell.

And once a devilkin took lodging in his belly, and there

created “rumbling noises like a toad, and which, for hours,

spoiled the concentration of all of the other Brothers.”

We find parchment scraps with appropriate exorcisms:

“Away! you flaming sow, you poisoned udder,

you arse of the arch-fiend, shit-fly, stinking he-goat,

out out out, away, back into thine infernal kitchen,

you bestial puke!” We also find

those charming marginal doodles (sprigs in flower,

unicorns, seemingly every songbird in Creation): such

diminutive external bodies given to the longings of these

cooped-up men. And when they came to drag my friend Jess

screaming to the ward, because he was beating his head

on the lawyer’s steps, it was clear to us all that the chemicals

in his mind had turned against him. It was clear to Jess

that he was being hunted like prey by hounds from the moon. 

This Is My First Affair

Back soon, enjoying the day-off thing, I had no idea, no one told me.

Thanks to Operation Memory, Each of Us Woke Up in a Different Bed or Coffin, with a Different Partner Beside Him, in the Middle of a War that Had Never Been Declared

Meredith Monk is seventy today. I've been posting Monk since I've been posting because love, but be forewarned - Hamster can vouch I've been saying this - my ears are trending choral, I hear where this is going. PLEASE, if there are choral pieces you think should be heard - old, new, any era, I spread for good music - send them to me. As for Blegsylvanian history, this bout of nostalgia prompted by (the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania) Agi's posting this photo of the reunion of the gloriously defunct Agitprop, the second of two places where I group-blegged, which I joined late just before it died. Sorry. El Serracho in particular looks great.

• Candy bullets and moon.
• About the honor of being human.
• Our systems of disinformation are self-correcting.
• Beneath the layers.
• War in Gaza = war over $$$?
• Eliminationism.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Motherfucking Obama.
• Motherfucking Democrats. 
• Motherfucking Washington Post.
• He's the one.
• Yes, it is.
• Courage in Hullabalooland: So don't expect a lot of coverage of the issue. Most of us don't want to take a lot of stupid abuse from nutty people for speaking powerlessly over an issue in which both sides deserve plenty of scorn.
• The gutless fuck above fails to link to the Chris Floyd article he references. The gutless fuck.
• UPDATE! Floyd responds to the gutless fuck.
• The practice of anarchy.

• Yes, I knew this.
• Bernhard, for those of you who do.
• Outlawing Shakespeare.
• Jack Gilbert obit from Britain.
• Gerald Stern interview.
• Candelabyrinth.
• Take the survey.
• List of potential Giftmas presents you can buy me.
• Going to a Lindsey Buckingham concert.
• Fuck, it's that time of year again.

OPERATION MEMORY

David Lehman

We were smoking some of this knockout weed when

Operation Memory was announced. To his separate bed

Each soldier went, counting backwards from a hundred

With a needle in his arm. And there I was, in the middle

Of a recession, in the middle of a strange city, between jobs

And apartments and wives. Nobody told me the gun was loaded.

We'd been drinking since early afternoon. I was loaded.

The doctor made me recite my name, rank, and serial number when

I woke up, sweating, in my civvies. All my friends had jobs

As professional liars, and most had partners who were good in bed.

What did I have? Just this feeling of always being in the middle

Of things, and the luck of looking younger than fifty.

At dawn I returned to draft headquarters. I was eighteen

And counting backwards. The interviewer asked one loaded

Question after another, such as why I often read the middle

Of novels, ignoring their beginnings and their ends. when

Had I decided to volunteer for intelligence work? "In bed

With a broad," I answered, with locker-room bravado. The truth was, jobs

Were scarce, and working on Operation Memory was better than no job

At all. Unamused, the judge looked at his watch. It was 1970

By the time he spoke. Recommending clemency, he ordered me to go to bed

At noon and practice my disappearing act. Someone must have loaded

The harmless gun on the wall in Act I when

I was asleep. And there I was, without an alibi, in the middle

Of a journey down nameless, snow-covered streets, in the middle

Of a mystery--or a muddle. These were the jobs

That saved men's souls, or so I was told, but when

The orphans assembled for their annual reunion, ten

Years later, on the playing fields of Eton, each unloaded

A kit bag full of troubles, and smiled bravely, and went to bed.

Thanks to Operation Memory, each of us woke up in a different bed

Or coffin, with a different partner beside him, in the middle

Of a war that had never been declared. No one had time to load

His weapon or see to any of the dozen essential jobs

Preceding combat duty. And there I was, dodging bullets, merely one

In a million whose lucky number had come up. When

It happened, I was asleep in bed, and when I woke up,

It was over: I was 38, on the brink of middle age,

A succession of stupid jobs behind me, a loaded gun on my lap.