[Another gunman]

Another gunman.
Perhaps if the pregnant sluts
casually killing

unwanted children
carried, could shoot this blessed
hero for unborn...

See How Dirty Your Hands Are

• Shkrelicapitalism & Dentistanimaltrophyism, both within past three months, both might as well be twenty years ago today.
• Ethical Loneliness: We live in a world where every relatively privileged life relies on the use of misery: the clothes we wear and the food we eat come from abusive labor conditions, the super-wealthy hide their money in tax havens to avoid contributing to larger social benefit, powerful nations pay corrupt elites in underdeveloped nations for natural resources at rates that benefit everyone except the people living in those underdeveloped nations, and it is all legal. Most individuals benefiting from that misery have not participated directly in imposing oppressive or violent conditions. And so they may think they cannot be responsible for what happens. My point: many will be left unprotected and without recourse even in a world where everyone lives up to their legitimate legal duties and does nothing more than that. More is needed. But in order to see that you have to tell yourself a different story about where responsibility comes from and who bears it. If you believe in a justice beyond bare legal culpability, then you have to accept responsibility for more than what you’ve done and intended.
• Same old shit (featuring Blue Nile).
• In praise of Hillary Clinton's pandering.
• I tweeted this Friday night regarding Sanders addressing Shkrelicapitalism: After intense focus group Sunday clears pronouncment Monday morning Inevitability will say ditto.
• Last night I discovered that Clinton and Sanders will debate on Tuesday and I thought to myself, that could be good TV, this morning? Fuck that, it's as stupid and useless as blogging on a Helmetball Sunday of a three day weekend.

• Neoliberalism: a sick obsession.
• The end of academic freedom in America.
• Sure, Ben Carson is wrong, I'm freaked out about Jake writing for The New Republic.
• News on the march.
• Justin Bieber's dick.
• Landscape of dreams.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• Roethke, for those of you who do.
• Ashbery, for those of you who do.
• Woke up with the 80s in my head. I think it's a good thing, ymmv.

THE MAUVE NOTEBOOK

John Ashbery

On a set you need bush rebels,

that numbing little chair while passing.

If we knock 'em out

seven precincts are going to show up.

It looks like you don't need oil.

I think it'll be fine.

Did she think that might be good,

or for the man who listens to it,

nothing to be done or thought,

(section pending)?

Or for the man who listens to it,

an abrupt yawn, history or the other.

Home economics.  Dr. Singalong

can't find his way back.

I don't know about that, but

at her lamps do you still see

the awkward ceremony, too serious?

Leave it that way, imperfect start beyond

where I was going.

Prison outside the perpetual sonata,

the only anxiety,

since you wonder what they don't do,

from your red zero heart page

waiting to touch your face.

Although they know about it and

it literally doesn't exist,

no, stay up and go to sleep,

unless it falls on the right side of the brain

positioned for so many forgeries,

moon nugget...

I don't cut 'em any slack.

Assault on a clean front,

that's a lot to be turning into.

These residents, they start throwing 'em early.

Continue to open your door to mud!                                                          

Take the noon balloon to Rangoon,

gutta percha academy,

to the place of ice cream,

 

because, really, what difference does it make?

When it was time you went home.

Tears and flowers,

see how dirty your hands are.

We had a lovely dime.

Soon it will be seven I ask you.

It Is Hard to Create Such Filthy, Vile Putrescence

• My definitive statement of my position on every fucking thing. I should be enjoying this more. Perhaps I am enjoying it more than I think? I distrust everything I read, everything I write. This should be more fun.
• Are you a narrative or a non-narrative? The dangerous idea that life is a story.
• Europe: a Prophecy.
• Dead children.
• Neoliberal urbanism: designing neighborhoods for police control.
• Face of a boy.
• Environmental ethics in a post-natural world.
• Clearing up ambiguity.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Staffage.
• Anne Carson poem. Please?
• Here, my new favorite thing in the world:

THE BARBARIC WRITERS

Daniel Borzutsky

When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my

manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of

fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to

destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but

never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called

poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his

back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned

him. I have always know that constipation is essential to

poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently,

was that poetry itself is repulsive. Words on their own are

bad enough. But when placed alongside other words, when formed

into rhythmic lines and stanzas: no act of creation is more

hideous. In the salons, I have often watched, before my turn

came on, our local poets reciting their verses. They speak

politely, and with grace, to an audience that sips wine and

chuckles at the words that flow not from their mouths, but from their

plugged-up behinds. What a holy mockery of literature!

Were the barbarians to see such a spectacle, no

theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter. No, poetry

is not what I want. Only defecation on poetry. For

after years of humiliation, I have finally learned that

to humanize our poems, we must shit on them. We must shit

freely, with arms raised, as detectives in blue sport coats examine

our feces for sustainability, all the while fighting

off other detectives in bluer sport coats who take our

poetic leakage to their laboratories to search for

parasitic demons, or diamonds, depending on the angle.

We smear what drips from our self-inflicted wounds onto our verses,

combining blood and ink into new poetic forms in which we

rub our faces, the better to smell our disgusting children with,

the better to drool on our disgusting children with; and once we

have bled and drooled and driveled, we declare our poems complete, the

better to wipe our asses with, before submitting them for

publication. We smear our typewriters with pus and semen, and

chastise any fool crass enough to declare himself a poet,

an offense punishable by confinement in a cage

surrounded by Barbaric Writers who expectorate between

the distinguished author’s eyes, his hands tied behind his back to

prevent him from cleaning his face. For poetry is hard work! It

is hard to create such filthy, vile putrescence.

[Witness protection poem...]

I Want to Be Entered and Picked Clean

Do not eat at Jimmy Johns - the owner kills elephants and rhinos for fun. Nothing - nothing - Darkens me with Dark more than these fuckers. I daydream of hunting them down, shooting them in the kneecaps and, as they writhe in pain, beg for their lives, I smash their cheeks with an aluminum baseball bat before plunging their heads into a turned-to-the-highest temperature deep-fryer. Dark? I hate these fuckers, yes, mostly for who they are, but I hate these fuckers for what they reveal to me about me, both what I'm capable of daydreaming and my cowardice I will never live it out. I printed out that photo from the tweet and taped it this morning at 630 to the front door of the Jimmy Johns in Glover Park on Wisconsin. Brave me. These fuckers are the distillation of all that is shitty about humans. I am the distillation of all that is shitty about humans.

• Whatever happened to the motherfucking dentist? Funny how that story evaporated like it never was.
• I had never eaten at Jimmy Johns, now will never eat at Jimmy Johns (not that I was likely to).
• Today in motherfucking cops.
• Biden's only positive is he isn't Hillary. Plus it's a work.
• The Fearful and Frustrated: In New Hampshire, where voters pride themselves on being unimpressed, Fred Rice, a Republican state representative, arrived at a Trump rally in the beach town of Hampton on an August evening, and found people waiting patiently in a two-hour line that stretched a quarter of a mile down the street. “Never seen that at a political event before,” he said. Other Republicans offer “canned bullshit,” Rice went on. “People have got so terribly annoyed and disenchanted and disenfranchised, really, by candidates who get up there, and all their stump speeches promise everything to everyone.” By the night’s end, Rice was sold. “I heard echoes of Ronald Reagan,” he told me, adding, “If I had to vote today, I would vote for Trump.”
• Random early morning barking.
• Danger along the border.
• There goes the neighborhood.
• Tiptree, for those of you who do (and those like me who should).
• More SciFi, for those of you who do (not those like me who can't).
• Yo La Tengo is playing live this morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and this changes for the worse my feelings for Yo La Tengo. Not fair, I know, but.
• Here's that live at WFMU Mekons set.
• Charles Wright is eighty today.

CLEAR NIGHT

Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.

Moon-fingers lay down their same routine

On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.

Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.   

I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me.

And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.

And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.   

And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

You Are a Universe Beyond My Mitochondria

• All four of my semi-annual Please Confirm Continuing Existence emails I emailed out a week ago last night have gone unanswered. 1 of 4 hasn't answered in three years, 2 of 4 hasn't in two, 3 of 4 hasn't in eighteen months, 4 of 4 hasn't in a year. It's time I cull the blogrolls of the moribund (of which there are more and more), those who haven't posted in at least four months: I move the slumbering if probably dead to Moribund so I notice if they stir. In real life..... loved ones are OK, but they've moved, are moving, are busy to the point of disappearance. I'm as guilty as any, more. Your mileage may vary (if you even drive), but I'm happier with my writing as I've been in a long time, the sad (in this case) and Dark (in general) good fertilizer. Is fucked. Fuck me.
• Keats, fires, droughts, motherfucking humans.
• The Soft Fascism of America.
• Um, unpack this if you want. I'm trying not to.
• Badiou, for those of you who do.
• Mumpsimus expands beyond Mumpsimus.
• David Markson, for those of you who do.
• Tying things together: Sorrentino, for those of you who do.
• So I'm halfway through DeLillo's Players, halfway through his Cosmopolis. I think I've said this before: reading dialogue in DeLillo is like hearing the dialogue on Gilmore Girls (when I'd hear it while trying to read in another room while Earthgirl and Planet - who has moved to Michigan - watched reruns), everyone is so fucking witty with dripping irony (I'm as guilty of that as any, more). Still, it seems to be working of a sorts. A project perhaps worthwhile (UPDATE!: strike-thru) that I will never undertake: take every DeLillo novel, divide it into twelve, then read section one of each novel then section two etc as if they are all one big novel. Cause they are.
• UPDATE! Thank fucking Baal I used the Library's pencil underlined and highlighted copies rather than investing in new books, this is not going to end well by which I think it may be ending soon, by which I mean it's ended. It IS a fucking episode of Gilmore Girls. I get why I once got and get why I don't now.
• Woke up this morning with Bardo Pond's cover of Eno's Warm Jets, yay me!

ANY LIT

Harryette Mullen

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone

You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia

You are a union beyond my meiosis

You are a unicycle beyond my migration

You are a universe beyond my mitochondria

You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis

You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram

You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur

You are a eureka beyond my maitai

You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper

You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird

You are a unit beyond my mileage

You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye

You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key

You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe

You are a Utah beyond my microcosm

You are a Uranus beyond my Miami

You are a youth beyond my mylar

You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia

You are a Ukranian beyond my Maimonides

You are a Euclid beyond my miter box

You are a Univac beyond my minus sign

You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro

You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan

You are a U-boat beyond my mind control

You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma

You are a urethra beyond my Mysore

You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow

You are a ubiquity beyond my minority

You are a eunuch beyond my migraine

You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness

You are a urinal beyond my Midol

You are a uselessness beyond my myopia

His Head Kecked Back and Howling

• How colleges sold their soul to the market: We have always been, in the United States, what Lionel Trilling called a business civilization. But we have also always had a range of counterbalancing institutions, countercultural institutions, to advance a different set of values: the churches, the arts, the democratic tradition itself. When the pendulum has swung too far in one direction (and it’s always the same direction), new institutions or movements have emerged, or old ones have renewed their mission. Education in general, and higher education in particular, has always been one of those institutions. But now the market has become so powerful that it’s swallowing the very things that are supposed to keep it in check. Artists are becoming “creatives.” Journalism has become “the media.” Government is bought and paid for. The prosperity gospel has arisen as one of the most prominent movements in American Christianity. And colleges and universities are acting like businesses, and in the service of businesses.
• Posted mostly because I agree with much of it (and witness daily here at Illhoptay) but also because I find I have been writing too much here about work, macro and micro, which is to say barely at all but more barely at all than I will going forward. I don't not want to write about work because I think it is being monitored by overlords (though I have been warned in general if not specifically) or because I know it's being read by friends and colleagues, and it's not because I am writing anything inflammatory much less incendiary (though I daydream, especially recently, of doing so). Here it is: fuck work - there are other fine metaphors abounding for the motherfucking Dark to need bring this fucking flavor of Dark here.
• The economic inequality in academia.
• Things I didn't know I loved.
• By 2100 everything you know about oceans will be wrong.
• Why are people so freaked out about Corbyn?
• Reasons to be please with Corbyn.
• Nobody is waiting for your masterpiece.
• Millions of us.
• One last thing about work (LOUD please):

READ THESE

Mary Karr

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’s foliage into bloom

where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love

before at last taking himself away. His head away. His

recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine

themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more

than instruments of his creation. Pawns.

Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us

studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.

Once he was not a king, only a pale boy staring down

from the high dive. The contest was seriousness

he decided, who shaped himself for genus genius

and nothing less. Among genii, whoever dies first wins.

Or so he thought. He wanted the web browsers to ping

his name in literary mention everywhere on the world wide web.

He wanted relief from his head, which acted as spider

and inner web weaver. The boy was a live thing tumbled in its thread

and tapped and fed off, siphoned from. His head kecked back

and howling from inside the bone castle from whence he came

to hate the court he held.

He was crowned with loneliness

and suffered for friendship, for fealty

of the noblest sort. The invisible crown

rounded his temples tighter than any turban,

more binding than a wedding band,

and he sat in his round tower

on the rounding earth.

                                                     Read these,

saith the King, and put down his pen, hearing

himself inwardly holding forth on the dullest

aspects of the human heart

with the sharpest possible wit. Unreadable

as Pound on usury or Aquinas on sex.

I know the noose made an oval portrait frame for his face.

And duct tape around the base of the Ziploc

bag was an air-tight chamber

for the regal head—most serious relic,

breathlessly lecturing in the hall of silence.

Self-Analytical Attitudes Overlaid by My Ghostly Transparent Face

Thanks sent to Lambert, who linked to the Melville post in yesterday's Naked Capitalism daily links, that post got more hits in the first hour than any post got here ever. Considering it was a Sunday in the Blog Days of Summer, that speaks to how big Naked Capitalism is.

More hits in two minutes than my poem posted this morning will get in eternity. It's me, not you, I know, so don't worry, I've disappeared it, you needn't avoid it getting to the next post. So I was looking at my bookshelves, looking at Melville post, looking at bookshelves, looking at Melville post, what to read to break the reading slump, hmmm, maybe a novel that has broken slumps before, in an edition that is my single favorite book-as-object I've ever read, Bible-sized and fannie-pack ready for breaks in the woods, hmmm? Well, it's not working, but I do have an extra copy of that edition, if I like you and you ask nice and you promise to try to read it (you need not promise to finish, only to try) it can be yours. (UPDATE!: not any more it can: claimed.)

• I owe you links:
• Fire Season. If you only read one of these links today, please make it this one.
• Criticism as a form of living.
• Semiocapitalism and the neoliberal self.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• This Space is now a book.
• For those of you who read SciFi, Ethan has a few quick reviews.
• Shih-Tzu/Yorky mutt!
• I made it 100 pages into Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, but it's too fucking hip for me. It reminds me of when I'd be trying to read in the living room when Earthgirl and Planet watched Gilmore Girls, a show of relentlessly witty fuckwits all trying to out-fuckwitty each other. Yes, I'm aware of the self-irony in previous sentence. Not giving up yet, I've just put it down for a break, be curious to see if I pick it back up if/when the current slump is busted.
• Moby Dick - a short riff on a long book.
• The virtues of difficult fiction?
• Harry Partch, at a glance.
• Harry Partch.

WET CASEMENTS

John Ashbery

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into theopen doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.

                                        KAFKA, Wedding Preparations in the Country

The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected

In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through

Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of

Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your

Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas

Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,

The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you

Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)

Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be

         approached,

Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present

Which would have its own opinions on these matters,

Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes

That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail

Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)

Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet

For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in

And out of it. I want that information very much today,

Can't have it, and this makes me angry.

I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that

Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling

Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face

Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.

I shall keep to myself.

I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

Dark Days When I Awaken So I Slump

• The poem I started last night shouts at me this morning. Lordy, my jones for louder and quieter.
• We all hate the lion-killer. Here's a comment I wrote on the post when I was lion-killer hating: Fuck humans, of which I insist I'm not worst (egoist that I am) but am amply shitty. What appears in this post bears little to what I first wrote. I wished the fucker professional ruin, which I stand by as his profession affords him his killing trips. I wished for ruin in his personal life too. So, I was wishing harassment on his employees (like he would answer the phones for me to tell him to fuck off or open all new suspicious mail etc) and pain on his loved ones, some of whom, though they love him, may not be despicable fucks themselves.
• So yes, fuck me.
• Capitalism.
• My Favorite POTUS. I like you, Jimmy, but things same as they ever was.
• The Cimmerian Hypothesis, part three.
• And you thought Greece had a problem.
• In Ewigkeit.
• He does not wear bladder-leak pants.
• Nearby is the country they call life.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• The new Vollmann isn't working. An old McElroy isn't working. The new Jeremy Davies is sort of working but not like it should. The new Matthea Harvey was working but now it isn't. So fuck me.

THE HURT SONNET

Casey Thayer

Dark days when I awaken so I slump
                    back to the swamp of his armpit, a whit

from the arachnid he inked to the stump
           that's left. So close to the vestige of it,


                                 the danger he's a reliquary of:
            tattooed noose to venerate the fist

                     of a slug buried still in his butt above
a white cross for the men he didn't miss.

                                          

           If only I could strip off the black map
I sleep against and be his liniment,

                   gloss over the explosion, the mishap
                              phantom he feels in a forearm itch.

             

            He won't leave the long tale his tattoos read
                    for me, so I amend the story.

              

[Things I used to believe]

I Dropped a Vollmann Hardback on My Keyboard & Now U Don't Exist