Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus

• What if Ginsberg hadn't died and shitlords hadn't cemented at least two decades of pig-guaranteed Supreme Court corporate protection?
• Today is October 17, 2020, the election eighteen days away, it's a foregone conclusion Trump will lose at the timestamp I post this
  
• What would October 17, 2020 be if RBG alive, our shitlords' at least two decades of Supreme Court protection *not* guaranteed?
• Would you trade Ginsberg's life for Trump's defeat?
  
• No, I don't think our shitlords poisoned Ginsberg, I do think her death removed Trump's only remaining value to our shitlords and changed our shitlords' plans for October 
• Dems delivered, as reward for service and with trust Dems will grift within acceptable boundaries let Dems suck the faucet first in full first for two years, half-jones next two years while shitlords consolidate gains ahead of 2024's cracker restoration
  
• If you'd bet me digital pints October 2020 would be the most boring of this potuscycle I'd owe you digital pints
• Two Bob's birthday yesterday, Weir's 73rd, Mould's 60th
  

 

• Shit changes, of course, kabooms can still happen, but my digital pints are on Ginsberg's death as the single most determining event in this potuscycle
  
• Who elected Donald Trump
• Dogshit Presidents
• Motherfucking Democrats
  
• Crackerpigs
  
• What do you know about yourself? 
• Oh my sweet imaginary friend Cracker Jesus, are you OK?
• Caste: the origin of our discontents
  
• Kill your gas stove
• Holding your grandparents' kettle (remember when Goldsmith was half of Songs for Aging Children, mocomofos?)  
• Because God did not relax: on the reissue of Gaddis' *Recognitions* and *JR*
• I woke up with Spicer in my head
  

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY

Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.

I am thinking of wet hills in the rain

Pouring water. Shedding it

Down empty acres of oak and manzanita

Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,

Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.

Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana

Driving the hills crazy,

A fast wind with a bit of dust in it

Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.

Or down in the city where the peach trees

Are awkward as young horses,

And there are kites caught on the wires

Up above the street lamps,

And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer

As slow getting started

As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza

After a lot of unusual rain

California seems long in the summer.

I would like to write a poem as long as California

And as slow as a summer.

Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow

As the very tip of summer.

As slow as the summer seems

On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside

Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road

Between Bakersfield and Hell

Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.

When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways

Traveling up and down her skin

Long empty highways

With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them

On hot summer nights.

I am thinking that her body could be California

And I a rich Eastern tourist

Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California

That I have never seen.

Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,

Send them.

One of each breast photographed looking

Like curious national monuments,

One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway

Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging

In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem

Will be repeated. How many summers

Will torture California

Until the damned maps burn

Until the mad cartographer

Falls to the ground and possesses

The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

if by alternating tongues we

Bob Mould has a new album this September, early released a clusterfuck song!

• Oh well
• A long-time baseball writer tweeted: an agent last week: "They're actually going to burn it all down," they the shitlords who own the teams who teem to break all unions (but the police) and especially want to break MLBPA, it's personal bucket-list
• I retweeted: Rereading first two of Mantel's Henry trilogy ahead of reading the new third reminds me our shitlords were ever thus, if they can't have everything nobody gets anything
• I tweeted at a name the wrong movie tweet: Peewee's Big Adventure (the swimming pool scene) (this a beacon to crazy pants)
• ditto here instead of a bleggalgaze, how what just happened everywhere evaporates like the alcohol on your plague wipe (or disappearing
• branding not forgotten never was as soon as removed)
• I thought I'd miss local Nats radio play-by-play more than I do

• I have Doctor Sevrin ears, currently sunburn red in real life
• Jack Cox Dodge Rose
• Remember when the plague was here?
• Re: Mantel's Henry trilogy and shitlords ever thus they are all leveraged, blackmailed, and extorted against each other, it's fun for the just psychopathic, the smartest, most dangerous among them know there's no there there, *they're* the sociopaths to fear
• Small insight
• Remember when the plague was here? 
• Shitlords will not let a plague go to waste
• Beware of lateral thinking
• Obamapostasies: a refresher
• Death in Moco. First time I ate a breakfast bagel sandwich at Bagel City was when I worked a few emergency shifts at Crown Books #801 in the same shopping center in the mid-80s, beloveds can vouch, if not for Crown Books there would be no Planet, who ate many a breakfast bagel sandwich at Bagel City with Earthgirl and me

TICKLED SYNC

Susan Parr

While in bells I lie,

who lies, if my belle—

my female I—

the one I Hallmark,

with my feelings; we-one

I tremble with consort—

who lies, if  by alt-

ernating tongues we

two-speak false rap-

port, peal apart?

Who lies—if  I she-and-I

deliver our ultima-

tum: my surly quiver,

her curt surprise—

if my two-timing slips?

If  Time itself

stutters the part—

if it inserts (and she

hearts!) a skipping second

one into my her-verge,

her to-my-from—

pushes in an extra

friend, an other, phan-

tom pendulum?

At First, As You Lie in Bed in Your Motel Room or Mobile Home

We drove to the wonderful Virginia Museum of Fines Arts in Richmond yesterday to see an Edward Hopper (and others) exhibit on art of traveling in general and hotels in particular, here's an Earthgirl three-minute sketch of me (I was unaware at the time) with a Hopper hotel painting on the wall behind me:

• I like how she captured my claw perched to poke the digital device I am slave to
• Lots of photos of the exhibit and especially VMFA's terrific collection of late 20th C/21st C art at @blckdgrd on twaater
• The ethics of not supporting Sanders
• Freak out time for motherfucking professional Democrats (Chris Matthews, who I had the chance to murder in the San Francisco airport in 2008, says Bernie wouldn't stop to help you if you were hit by a car)
• Big story in today's NYT (no link, I don't subscribe), the standard whine that Sanders supporters are mean so Bernie disqualified
• I am telling you three times internal polling has Sanders leading by more than being reported
• Earthgirl has had her motherfucking Democrats apostasy, thank you, Hillary
• Nomadland: RVing across America for minimum wage temp jobs
• Meanwhile, our sociopath overlords
• Meanwhile, our sociopath overlords
• If you don't want Sanders to win Iowa by thirty you suck
• Stuart Staples interview, I wish I liked the new Tindersticks more than I do, after a dozen listens, I blame me
• What to say to motherfucking centrist Democrats who complain you're mean to them

POPULATION CONTROL IN GILLETTE

Tom Clark

The coal trains go through all night long
with a racket like all of hell being unleashed as noise.
At first, as you lie in bed in your motel room or mobile home
it merely disrupts your sleep, your nervous system. Later you kill
        your dog and wife

Backwash of the Rotors

There will or won't be reports from the breakfast lounge of the Comfort Inn in Chelsea Michigan tomorrow and/or Saturday and/or Sunday, if yes I'll let you know if the TV is tuned to the Weather Channel

• Still nervous about Harold Bloom
• Gentle plea
• Flacks and figures
• I will be eating dinner tonight in the home of trumpers, I will not be the cause of any trouble and my son-in-law has asked his grandparents to not cause any either (there has never been trouble before, there will not be trouble tonight)
• Critical bite of cultural relativism
• Studying beyond education
• American exceptionalism 
• Things I can't write here: stories of teaching art in a semi-rural Michigan high school 
• Slow fire
• Passenger trains?
• Bob turned 59 yesterday

ETERNITY

Tom Clark

The god of war assured King Arsounas, “Do not be fooled by words. No life is taken. Know that no one was ever born, nor does anyone die.” In the violent mini-eternity of the warrior, combat is conducted according to a ritual formal as song: no one is ever born, no one can ever die. The left-handed rockabilly guitarist whose left arm was severed by an RPG round at Dak To has come back to life in a part of my body that died long before we started to patrol this part of the river of eternal woe. His life is mine though I never lived it. The violent backwash of the rotors is crimsoned by a fine aerosol spray of blood while a loudspeaker amplifies the goddess’ excited laughter.

lonely as the red noses of four clowns

• Two photos in six hours yesterday of Maryland hiking talisman for us, a tweet saying I can't hike at a photo of the trail we hike most often (Browning Run, best in park) and a Post article about a town we drive through a dozen times a year to get to the AT.
• I'm fine w NL teams losing World Series because they don't invest millions in half a baseball player
• Is weird, I'm a cranky old bastard about National League baseball, I know the hired help want it, but I hate the DH, go ahead and kill it. Please.
• The experience of experience.
• Dear Virginia Democrats: give me $50 and I'll never visit to Richmond again, will swerve by on 295.
• It's working:

• I didn't think it would
• jinxed now it still might
• Found at Second Story on Parklawn month or two ago
• Hamster, Eddie from 848 works late nights
• I currently abhor dialogue in novels, it dawned on me, my problem with novels now
• I've been able only to read Murnane and Proust, not a coincidence
• dialogue, no one talks in real life like characters in novels are typed talking (except Gaddis characters)
• I can't
• but Elkin knows, so his logorrhea works, it always has.
• Hey, there's new Bob Mould:

GRACIOUS LIVING                "TARA"

Tom Raworth

lonely as four cherries on a tree

at night, new moon, wet roads

a moth or a snowflake

whipping past glass

      

lonely as the red noses of four clowns

thrust up through snow

their shine four whitened panes

drawn from imagined memory

      

lonely as no other lives

touching to recorded water

all objects stare

their memories aware

      

lonely as pain

recoiling from itself

imagining the cherries

and roses reaching out

Holding Your Eyes in Your Hands Like Addresses

• Work sucks, sorry, I can't blurt about work more than that, I don't want to blurt about work more than that, I want to stop thinking about motherfucking work so I can fan my futile hate of brett MOTHERFUCKING kavanaugh and the fucks on my former team who made him inevitable.
• Actually, I want to stop thinking about motherfucking work AND not inflame my luxurious futile hate of brett MOTHERFUCKING kavanaugh, I say Fuck the Either/Or all the time but can not live it.
• Thudner stirs.
• That's why I keep cemetery blogrolls.
• Theses on Kaepernick.
• Minority rule and late-phase culture.
• Self-reminder: bleggalgazing while flogged with work suck leads to >> deleted bleggalgaze <<
• UPDATE! Four futures at the end of capitalism.
• Trust only the children.
• UPDATE! Prison Strike 2018.
• Lordy, I mean, dodging bullets and muggers on Bethesda Row IS harrowing.
• UPDATE! Another lovesong to St Keynes.
• Cole Swensen interview.
• I need move lots of moribund to gravesites but McAfee blocks pop-up blogroll maintenance, so apt.
• Copper Blue mentioned on time line last night so.

           
NO WORRY

Cole Swensen

No, worry about nothing

but the chiseling

of hills into distance

in the slight haze

   

and sleep lost over color

no two ever the same

   

the wringing hands

float ashore amazed.

Worry about beauty.

It can sell you anything.

Lakes collect in the

chambers of the heart

where the sailboats are made

of flying fish about

the size of match heads.

   

Sleep can be lost as

easily as a house key,

the shock can consume

at any moment

if the hills are not rising 

weather is wearing them down

and you are driving

north in the late afternoon

or holding your eyes

in your hands like addresses.

Theme Song January 26 2017

Olive Bobblehead and Olive's Bobblehead

• In case you thought Earthgirl forgot Olive's grey spot between the ears.
• Here is what this snowstorm has taught me: for reading, progressive lenses are shit, my eyes hurt much less and not nearly as soon reading without glasses.
• My eyes will not let me read for more than an hour at a time. Last time I was at the eyedoc I asked if there is anything I can do to keep my eyes from hurting after a half hour (while wearing lenses at the time) reading, and he said, what are you, 60? and I said, no 56, and he laughed.
• So, surfing for me, links for you.
• Guidelines for an emergent poetics.
• Precarity (Tom, w more Ceravolo).
• #434.
• On abandoning novels.
• It could be aliens.
• The Trump Paradox: a Rough Guide for the Left.
• The Death of Capitalism.
• Why Bloomberg is considering a run.
• The consequences of speech.
• Bob Mould, for those of you who do.
• New Juliana Hatfield/Paul Westerberg!
• Here's today's poem, not typed out because, um, NEW JOHN CALE!

I Forget This Isn't My Universe Sometimes

I started this email last night to a colleague of mine in reference:  

Hi Jennifer, if I wanted to see how much cable news stations have hiked their ad rates since the wild success of the new 24-7 show We Are All Going to Die From Ebola in drawing new viewers (and if in fact there is a significant uptick in eyes), if I was curious, what databases would you recommend I try? Just curious, and yes, I realize the hysteria machines are running as much or more for the midterms in a month than for CNN profit... 

then stopped, didn't send. That was dangerously close to committing to research, and verily, fuck that.

No, I don't think the Triskelion scientists recruited at age six and sent to genius schools and who graduated PhD from MIT at age 16 created ebola. I do think, now that ebola has become 2014's favorite reality TV show, Triskelion scientists recruited at age six and sent to genius schools and who graduated PhD from MIT at age 16 are monitoring the national Galvanic Sheep Response - providing, now, as necessary for testing, plenty of stimuli - measuring how much bullshit will these freaking morons eat and what kind of stimuli best creates behavior beneficial to the Triskelions, including but not limited to total fucking public panic.

So yes, it is an opportune time for my biennial reading of Gravity's Rainbow, it still fucking holds-up, it's as relevant as ever, and if this rereading is the best in a decade I have no one but, um,  the Triskelions to thank.







A reminder, from GV: PROVERBS FOR PARANOIDS!

1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek. 
5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.   

# 5, wait, is that a hardon? Who's watching? What was that octopus doing on that beach with Katje and how did Bloat happen to have a crab in his hand? Hey, Bob Mould is fifty-four today.

• One of only two (Westerberg the other) who are younger than me who get an Egoslavian Holy Day. The above? Philly 1983, one of dozens of the best five nights of my life.
• There's also this point of view to consider: so maybe the extremely authoritative presentation even of things about which you are not sure at all has the momentary effect of reassuring people. the problem is merely reality: when what you're saying turns out to be incredibly false, people stop believing you. they start generating alternative speculations on this or that. they start believing random websites, which indeed have more credibility. at some level they freak out in the awareness that they've got no idea at all what the truth is. nothing causes chaos like the breakdown of authority, and nothing causes the breakdown of authority like authority. It's also what's being studied.
• Remember when I CWCF (Cassandra, weathervane, canary, fool)? Not to worry, not coming back, found myself thinking of it today - the tag, not the Cassandra-ing, weathervaning, canary-ing, playing the fool, I still do that, but you know that because, um, I writing this post.
• The Hour of the Knife. Another CWCF.
• [The Committee] or: how I write about work.
• Dear Scott Lemieux: it is neither "surprising" or "dismaying," you fucking idiot.
• OK, I'll read a book about Gaddis and Powers and Danielewski and DeLillo.
• The ten best Mekon songs? Sorry, links are to spotify, fuck that, find them on your iPod, your Mekon playlist, easy. That's how you do research.

PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE

Nicky Beer

The night’s turned everything to junipers   

shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,   

weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.   

I forget this isn’t my universe   

sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling   

most of my life to land here, a lone skirl   

in the immaculate hush. In my world   

I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.   

Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not   

sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will   

do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.   

Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,   

seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—   

I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.

Held Up to a Mirror, He Writhed

    

• Was going to delete last night's KITH post (which I couldn't resist posting when I thought of it, it made me giggle multiplied by my attention sluttery) and post the two skits in this post, but Landru commented this morning so you get two extra Julie Doiron songs, why Doiron today explained below.
• I'm fascinated by the greenwald effect, the visceral reactions any mention of Glenn Greenwald provoke and provoke from 360 degrees. I confess, beyond my own pleasurable scratching of my own faux dissidence regarding transference of tribal jones first onto a totem and then hysterically off that totem, it's fun to whack a wasp nest (which is the second point of this bullet): while the first was my primary intent, the second I knew would entertain me. Greenwald has become - by whose design, by what dynamics, your theories are your theories, your ratios your ratios - a political lightning rod himself of which one must have an opinion and be judged - most times harshly, regardless of respective position on the greenwald spectrum, both vitriolic hate towards and vehement defensive love for. He's black licorice. Nobody seems neutral (at least in the Stringtowns I hang out in). Greenwald, regardless of the importance of what his work has or hasn't revealed and may or not still reveal, is a hotter button than any scandal of whatever he has or hasn't enabled. This isn't to damn anyone for any opinion they have on Greenwald or suggest it isn't held in good faith for valid reasons. I just find the phenomenon interesting.
• UPDATE: Fucked, baby.
• One thing this kabuki achieved is the thorough demonizing of the Tea Party, so thorough that when the attacks come on the safety net by Obama/Dems those of us who will protest and make noises about primarying DINOs will be relentlessly compared to the thoroughly demonized Tea Party. Obama will urged to abandon his far left base and heavily praised unto his legacy when he does.
• Oh my, Zizek says what I said day before yesterday: What is the ongoing U.S. government shutdown really about? In the middle of April 2009, I was taking a rest in a hotel room in Syracuse, N.Y. and jumping between two channels: a PBS documentary on Pete Seeger, the great American country singer of the Left, and a Fox News report on a country singer of the anti-tax “Tea Party,” who was performing a populist, anti-Obama song full of complaints about how Washington is taxing the hard-working ordinary people to finance the rich Wall Street financiers. There was the weird similarity between the two singers. Formulating an anti-establishment populist complaint against both the exploitative rich and the government, they called for radical measures, including civil disobedience. It was another painful reminder that today’s radical-populist Right strangely reminds us of the old radical-populist Left. Are today’s Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups, with their half-illegal status, seeing the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, not similar to the Black Panthers back in the 1960s? He then goes Thomas Frank and asks What's the Matter with Kansas?
• Of course the NSA is involved with the Drone Wars. Who didn't think so?

• King's Farm. That's technically Rockville, is really Gaithersburg.
• I did not know Selby's closed in Poolesville. The same family used to run the IGA on Diamond in Olde Towne.
• What your cat sees when it stares into space.
• On cat behavior. Re: ferals and the straight tail and meowing - all three of our ferals straight tail us, Napoleon runs to us meowing, he talks more and more all the time.
• An experiment in shell manipulation.
• The psychology of book abandonment.
• Uncollected Barthelme.
• New Ruefle poem! w/bonus Brad.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• I've still a crush on Julie Doiron that reminds me of being seventeen with a crush, the more ridiculously pangful the better, so happy to wake up this morning with this Julie Doiron song in my head:

METAPHYSICAL DOG

Frank Bidart

Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine

imitation, but in defiance -

butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till

his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.

How dare being
give him this body.

Held up to a mirror, he writhed.

Fifty-Three Today

One of only two (Westerberg the other) who are younger than me who get a Holy Day in Egoslavia. Was at the show below in Philly in 1983, one of dozens of one of the five best nights of my life.



       
*


           
*


 
*

Morbid Curiosity Makes You Watch, Though Warned Being What's Watching You're Watched

This post read yesterday at Sequenza21 reminded me of when I group-blogged at one of two group-blogs I group-blogged at once upon at time, reminded me of one of my dehydrated gags I use when I've run out of ideas for monologues: go look what I was blogging this date last POTUS. First, I'm reminded it's Bob Mould's birthday, his 52nd. Second, here's what I wrote October 16, 2008:

No no no, it's McCain's comprehensive suckitude, not Obama awesomeness, which means an October surprise, especially involving tanks, planes, bombs, and ay-rabs could vaporize Obama's lead in a swift kaboom, though the eerie absence of angrily abscessing clusterfucks internationally is perhaps encouraging, though forgive me if I find the quiet ominous. God-taunting is a habit of faith.

What I've learned: habits of faith are myopic. An African-American is nineteen days from (perhaps) being elected president, an event I frankly thought impossible as little as a year ago, and we are witnessing the potential collapse of the global economic system on a par with, if not exceeding, the Great Depression, and I am so personally invested in both events - and have zero control over either event - that I'm seemingly incapable of stepping outside my parochial self-interest and enjoying the historical import of either from a perspective of wonderment.

Jesusfuck, dig that color scheme which incorporates my beloved noxzema bottle blue (yes, I'll toogle over for a weekend sometime soon just for my sake), look how I keep all photos within the margins like a good boy! And see, nothing's changed: my rube, whatever flavor I claim tastes best on any given day, always trumps enjoying the what-the-fuck. So no, I'll not watch the debate tonight, thanks.

• The leakiness of surveillance.
• After the fire. It was a literally a proving ground.
• Lydon on Biden.
• Fisticuffs! I once thought Jennifer Rubin aspired to be successor to The World's Shittiest Human but she seems happy enough to be a well-paid assclown.
• Romney's plan and why he opposes it.
• Hippie-punching for dummies.
• Yes yes yes, motherfucking crackers.
• Passing gas.
• Paul Ryan is like Madeleine Albright.
• Quite possibly Pastor Sanctimonious' most sanctimonious column ever.
• "The Grand Bargain."
• Remembering Joe Bagaent.
• What is socialism?
• What is socialism?
• In praise of anarchy, part 3.
• Sequenza21 is a group-blog about contemporary classical music run by Jerry Bowles who also runs Best of the Blogs, a political group blog that I used to contribute to but left long ago for various reasons I can't bother to recall but mostly because I couldn't do there what I do here. I still read Sequenza21 occasionally if a post's title catches my eye in the blogroll, haven't been to Best of the Blogs in a year. 
• Bleggalgazing Blegsylvania. Of course it's a kindergarten sandbox. Always has been just like the real world re: power and its arrangements.
• The mesh of power.
• My current and future hell.
• When did Metro start sucking?
• New Danielewski reviewed. I was hoping it'd be good (and I still give it a look). 
• Book 1A.
• Three hours of good.

 
[SOME PEOPLE ARE TICKLISH]

Lyn Hejinian

Some people are ticklish and it's symptomatic of their sensitivity
They are quick, like storytellers, to express experience
There's evidence that the dream and every day the evidence
      is accumulating
They need its services
They cannot concoct without laughing a tthe strength of sheep
Still, the stretch of sensitivity is hard to measure

The senses, inventive, permit us to sleep
They got us into a situation
Among senseless objects, there is still some reality

But senses have objects - everything provides evidence of this
The objects make themselves available and laugh
Suddenly you're one of them

Morbid curiosity makes you watch, though warned
Being what's watching you're watched
As careful as it is to be eclectic you cannot choose
Dreaming of encyclopedias and thumbing backwards - is this
      what it is to have memories?