In All My Years As a Pedestrian Serving Juice To Guests, It Never Occurred To Me Thoughtfully To Imagine How a Radish Feels. She Merely Arrived

Barring the unexpected, two new folk moving into our house end of August (they are only five weeks old now), both children of ferals in York, Pennsylvania, rescued by a friend of L's, a crazier cat-person than even us (though we have more garden statuary), I'll soon be able to walk into my house and yell, Lucy, I'm home




Our next door neighbor is luckily (if you're me) or unluckily (if you're L) named Ricky, so Bob, short for Babalu (L did not get my allusion when I said Bob Alou the missing fourth Alou brother, the fuck am I old)





I love all cats but love black cats best. Strangest days of my life, I'm reading, and enjoying, and now jinxing Henry James' The Ambassadors, attempt number 54,798 at reading James, at the insistence of two English professors and longtime friends I promised years ago at a Thursday Night Pints I'd keep trying James' late great trilogy (Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl the other two) until I get it or keep trying until end times if necessary. I can't name Bob Lambert since Lambert, aka Corrente, a lost blogbud, already taken, I can see why. End times? Have a grid below the Miles Davis, today is his centenary

Our Brains Are Normalizing Atrocity							☟
"The psychopaths are conditioning us, through sheer repetition, to inhabit their moral universe of the medieval dark ages, in which prisoners are tortured and raped as a matter of operational routine, and the response of the civilized world is a furrowed brow and a State Department briefing about the importance of continued partnership"
They want us dead				Ben-Gvir is Israel
Huckabee tells Lebanese being bombed to thank Israel for seedless watermelons
Another day's necessary duhtrumpduh
Arlington Cemetery website drops links for Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
United States of Assholes					Expect a 2ionist false flag attack on the United States in the next two weeks
The far right is being racist. Here's why it's the left's fault						Starting	⮨
Criminal projection		Continuing Imperial Depravity--A Rant
How did we get here from there?					The People Do Not Need Permission
We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths
are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths we
ruled by motherfucking sociopaths we are
by motherfucking sociopaths we are ruled
motherfucking sociopaths we are ruled by
sociopaths we are ruled by motherfucking
who are fully supported by motherfucking Democrats
The Geopolitics of Class War in a Post-American World
New man-made horrors beyond comprehension dropped
"Nothing to see here, just the son of the President marrying the daughter of the accountant of a notorious child sex trafficker who was best friends with the groom's father"
The Coming Faculty Class War, and Other Prophecies
The Great Indigestion				You will own nothing
Israel just KILLED a team of rescue workers in southern Lebanon today in a DOUBLE TAP strike. A father and his daughter were killed, then rescue workers were ALSO bombed upon arrival.
Hegseth’s Desperate Crusade for Masculine Validation
☟	Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.
Authoritarianism and Mediocre Elites
The Zombie Revival of Dead Confederates
The Deafening Silence Of Rockstars On Palestine
A sick twenty-first-century take on strength and weakness
Things the Pope can say but students and faculty at Ivy League universities cannot					Withdrawal
Maggie		They Call It Stupid Hot For a Reason
Olga Tokarczuk uses AI to drive over the bones of her own novels
Barthelme, the Houstonian					{ feuilleton }
Taking the villian's part: on Gass' *The Tunnel*
Shakey	Robert Fripp Still Unsure Why Hospital Shaved His Balls After Heart Attack

THIS ECONOMY

John Ashbery

In all my years as a pedestrian
serving juice to guests, it never occurred to me
thoughtfully to imagine how a radish feels.
She merely arrived. Half-turning
in the demented twilight, one feels a
sour empathy with all that went before.
That, needless to say, was how we elaborated
ourselves staggering across tracts:
Somewhere in America there is a naked person.
 
Somewhere in America adoring legions blush
in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still.
Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out
how to pay for this, bouncing a ball
off a wooden strut. Somewhere
in America the lonely enchanted eye each other
on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue.
Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.                             

Forgetfulness That Seeps into Our Outline Defining Our Volumes w/a Stain

What if no Senate Democrat *wants* Schumer's job and all are grateful Schumer takes all the abuse and disdain and ire and contempt and loathing and fire? Ditto every congressional Democrat Hakeem Jeffries? No one who would replace either could change the donors' dictates, let Schumer and Jeffries reap the hate. You still haven't your Democratic Party apostasy yet? Of course you have. Holyfuck, listen to this, loud, LOUD! off this album:





Heard that first on a WFMU DJ's show, she plays terrific music but enjoys her mic-breaks more than the music she plays, in a three hour show she's talking when not whining about her life a minimum a sixth of that time, thank goodness for archives so I don't need listen live and can skip over the mic-breaks, every single one of them. Revolution, yo. Imagine, a problem I can solve on my own without counting on Jeffrey Epstein's emails to save me. Yesterday was Andy Partridge's 72nd birthday, XTC one of the rotating bands in my moribund if not abandoned My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, and this song off either my third, fourth, or fifth most listened-to album of my lifetime:





The clusterfuck is like the wound on the inside of your lower lip caused by an accidental bite that swells so much that you keep biting it, making it worse each chomp, it's that or go hungry or drink your shitty meal through a straw and fuck that, you keep biting your inner lower lip and pretend that's resistance. Time to go hungry for a day or two, I think, then eat, ouch. Shakey, who is beloved but not in the inner or outer circle of rotating musicians and bands for the three non-chaired seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, is eighty today

How To Rig a Whole-ass Economy
➥	"We work full-time to afford rent. We have insurance and can't afford healthcare. It's not an accident—it's by design. Let's have a look at how it's done"
The US Empire Keeps Getting Creepier
How news coverage eases us into tyranny
"One of the craziest things happening right now is how there's been report after report after report showing that Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it's had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics"
How America’s Elites Hide Theft in Plain Sight
To it's credit this psychotic tirade from Bezos Post's Editorial Board in the first sentence contains the phrase *Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani* but does NOT use the word *gulag*
"Republicans understood there is no opposition party, just a grifting machine that exploits and then betrays its own voters over and over again"
"American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base"
Avedon Carol's occasional links					No truth or mercy
On David Graeber’s Ideas About the Structural Stupidity of Bureaucracy
Stocks aren't salvation				Premature Exultation
What Really Happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?
Alternative Horizons			Icepick headaches		Paradox of Clothing
A preliminary report on his semi-involuntary social media detox
Maggie		The internet was not meant to suck
Hüsker Dü’s Generational Blues						Amnesia

CITY AFTERNOON

John Ashbery

A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of the now
Sucked screaming through old age and death.

If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting too

But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside-down in the reflecting pool.

The Routine Is All Too Familiar, the Stone Path Wearying

I'm not quitting twaater yet (some in my circle are still there and I'm not abandoing them because Trump and motherfucking Democrats) though some of yinz are for the blue place, if you're there and I'm not following you yet and you'd like me too please email me at blckdgrd at proton dot me. If you're there and want to find me I'm @blckdgrd.bsky.social. I don't curse and blurt there like I do (and still will) on twaater out of respect for its current don't curse and blurt social norm. I've been warned to get off twaater (and here) since the election but reply I've twenty years of cursing and blurting into the cloud, I'm incriminated already when my cursing and blurting are deemed worthy of the death penalty in Crackerchristerstan. I'm confident I will be evaporated in a nuclear blast before that happens. My right eye:

But yes, I understand the news that future Attorney General Roofie needs processing and for many that processing requires isolation from more news of our imminent and vicious enshittification. This blog has been dying since 2009, though never so fast and precipitously. I wish I could blame me (and I wish I would/could connect this to something I won't write about here that's imminent and not vicious but worse in real life, someone there is doing what I've been doing here the last fifteen years), but it's clusterfuck, who let us down, who we let down, how stupid we were, are, and will be, how enshittified. My left eye



I wish I could still see like my right eye and feel like my blind left I but I cope loudly, immerse myself in clusterfuck's goop, though last night, after adding the 44th or 45th link to the grid below, What The Fuck Am I Doing? hit me in the head with a garden shovel. I'll recover most likely, and I am not going to not post a grid today I've spent hours making (I do read everything I link), just saying, if yinz don't want to daily duh I get it, you may be on to something, though it would require another response to fuming I haven't yet discovered. This is one of the five most posted songs in the twenty years of here

Why the Migration to Bluesky Matters				☞	@blckdgrd.bsky.social
"FLINT STILL DOESN'T HAVE CLEAN WATER"
Best smackdown of Biden, Harris, motherfucking Democrats I've read
☝	"The biggest insult of all was, once again, the insistence by Biden and his sycophants that, against all evidence to the contrary, they were simply smarter than the rest of us. We spent over three years watching the president’s mind and body fail him — the raspy whisper with its improbable syntax, the sallow skin, the shuffling gait, the all-encompassing sleepiness Donald Trump mocked at every opportunity — while the regime and its media stenographers asked us to trust them instead of our lying eyes"						☝
☝	"Anyone who warned that Biden was disappointing the party’s progressive base encountered a blitz of kettle logic. Biden was the most transformative president since FDR; a pragmatist who knew where to compromise to get what he really wanted; a helpless victim of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And anyways, the election wouldn’t be won by emphasizing divisive policy issues, but by focusing on something everyone could get behind: Donald Trump’s threat to democracy. This judgment defied all the available evidence. As Biden’s term wore on, it became clear that Democrats’ incessant quest to use the legal system to hound Trump out of political life was doing nothing to dull his appeal, and perhaps was actually bolstering it. But Bidenworld remained determined to elevate Trump’s venality over any other campaign theme — including the fight to defend abortion rights, an issue that, if Democrats’ surprising success in the 2022 midterms was any indication, actually did have strong cross-partisan appeal"						☝
☝	"If they really believed that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting, why did the criminal case against him — those much-ballyhooed felonies — focus on issues like his mishandling of classified documents and his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels? Why, for that matter, were they legitimizing the use of the judicial system against one’s political opponents? Why weren’t they trying to fix anything about our hallowed American democracy? If it was on the verge of elevating a known fascist, after all, it must have already been in pretty bad shape, regardless of the outcome of the election. Democratic strategists simply did not seem to believe that most voters were smart enough to ask questions like these. Always, always that same intimation, barely unspoken: I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do."						☝
☝	"The Biden administration allowed Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to euthanize its early political-economic vision, centered around generous welfare-state expansion and federal support for the care sector. In the wake of that agenda came a program focused on industrial competition with China, and fueled at the core by military spending. Paeans to American greatness suffused the rhetorical soundscape of the late Biden administration. The president goaded on the nationwide repression of student protestors enraged by the genocide of Palestinians he was enabling. On immigration, he enthusiastically ran what Gabriel Antonio Solis describes in his preview piece as “a race to the right that only Republicans can win"						☝
☝	"Trump is the center of gravity of American politics. Exit polls indicate he captured 95 percent of the Republican vote, despite Democrats’ persistent fantasies about masses of Cheneyites joining the resistance, suburbs turning blue, Republican women secretly casting ballots for Democrats and lying to their husbands about it (on Julia Roberts’s advice). Trump has also worked hard to build an edge among loosely or nonpartisan Americans, embracing his identity as the candidate of Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and the artist formerly known as Kanye West. The “weird” demographic — youngish, heavily male, surprisingly multiracial, hyper-online, alienated and distrustful — has clearly found a home in the Trump movement. He is, after all, weird in his own way: a post-decorum politician, swaying to Ave Maria and extolling Arnold Palmer’s penis. For wide swaths of the population, Trumpism has become the default political ideology, where those without a strong reason to arrive at some rival set of principles inevitably wind up. Why wouldn’t it be? The Democrats have nothing to offer as an alternative but a simulacrum of MAGA politics stripped of the libidinal pleasures of rage and transgression, like the caffeine-free version of Trump’s favorite beverage, Diet Coke"						☝
Obama is deeply distraught over the election results
This is literally what Bill Clinton said when he was campaigning for Harris in Michigan lol
"They Blame the People That They Let Down"
"That there will not be any challenging candidates or debate in Democratic leadership elections in the House or Senate is a sign of a party that still doesn't want to address any hard questions despite its obvious decline"
☝	"ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE GRIFT!"						☟
"Axelrod pushes for Rahm Emanuel as DNC chair"
☝	"ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE GRIFT!"						☟
"Every time there’s a Trump nomination announcement, it’s helpful to remember that Democratic consultants are home at their mansions counting the tens of millions of dollars they just made off losing a winnable election that coulda prevented all of this"
"Friendly reminder that Biden could still end the genocide in Gaza right now. He could end it today. He could have ended it any day over the last thirteen months. Israel's atrocities will continue into the next administration because the Biden administration wants them to"
If shitlib friends and family still blaming you for not voting for genocide and that's why Trump kicked ass, a friendly reminder you were right regardless of election outcome
"Telling voters this guy is Hitler and gonna end America as we know it because he sent a mob to storm the Capitol when he lost last time and then sitting down for a fireside chat makes us look like the suckers and marks we are"
"You're about to watch Republicans pass legislation without the 60 votes that Liberals insist is necessary for Democrats to pass anything"
☟	"Adam Schiff, California's next senator, beloved by liberals everywhere standing up to Trump during his first admin, voted yes on this."						☟
"Why on earth are Democrats supporting this? Don't they know that their own favorite nonprofit organizations can easily be tarred as "terrorist-supporting" once you hand the government this power?"
☝	TODAY IN RHETORICAL QUESTIONS!						☝
"Miriam Adelson is hand-picking Trump's Cabinet in 2024 just like Citigroup picked Obama's in 2008"
Fine metaphor for shitlib worldview of politics
"Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will leave office in January with the minimum wage still at $7.25, seeing homelessness spike over 12%, and having participated in a genocide that has left at least 200,000 dead in Gaza"
"Fund the Police’ Backfired — and Gave Trump More Power Than Ever"
"These 52 Democrats voted to give Trump the power to shut down any nonprofit he wants. The NAACP, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, no organization would be safe. Shameful"
The Revenge of Trumperstein
White Evangelical Protestant media diet
Seven of Nine and Me, or: Leaving the Evangelical Borg Collective
"American liberalism searched the world for monsters to destroy and created them"
Across the Empire the illusion of Democracy™ is crumbling
The Reconfiguration of the Capitalist Parties in Light of Trump’s Victory
US Confirms Israel Will Face No Consequences for Not Improving Aid Situation in Gaza			Genocidal Scorecard
The media’s role in lying about Amsterdam violence just keeps getting darker
The not-so-secret history of Netanyahu’s support for Hamas
"Netanyahoo Knew The Attack Was Coming, Let It Happen On Purpose"
The state-backed settler war to annex the West Bank
Reading about the decline in the study of the humanities at university level
Maximizing Time for Reading
"If any novelist has successfully captured what happens to the human condition in the wake of world-historical cataclysm, that novelist is Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Although Krasznahorkai didn’t start publishing novels until forty years after the end of World War II, each is haunted by a distinct twentieth-century anxiety about apocalypse. Whether in a small Hungarian village, as in his debut Sátántangó, or across continents and millennia, as in his 2008 epic Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai continually grapples with the fleeting, futile nature of life on Earth and the power of time to dwarf all human endeavor. To call Herscht 07769 Krasznahorkai’s magnum opus would be inaccurate; everything he writes is a magnum opus"
Not me	☞	#1427 Samhain 36″x24″ Acrylic on canvas, with leaves, street dirt, glitter
Read “A Sudden Story,” a very short tale by Robert Coover
Auden’s Island: The poet in the postwar era
Stands for deciBels by The dB’s
Shakey turned seventy-nine Tuesday this week
The last twenty seconds of *Cinnamon Girl*

YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT

John Ashbery

Meanwhile, back in
soulless America, people are having fun
as usual.

A bird visits a birdbath.
A young girl takes a refresher course
in polyhistory. My mega-units are straining
at the leash of spring.
The annual race is on -

white flowers in someone's hair.
He comes in waltzing on empty airs,

mulling the blue notes of your case.
The leash is elastic and receptive
but I fear I am too wrapped up in cloudlets
of my own making this time.

In the other time is was rain dripping
from a tree to a house to the ground -
each thing helping itself and another thing
along a little. That would be inconceivable
these days of receptive answers and aggressive querying.

The routine is all too familiar,

the stone path wearying

Who In the World Despises Our Work as Much as We Do?

Who I'd like to be:



Who I am:



Will never be like the one at the top and terrified on dark days I will never be anyone but the one directly above (and terrified I will cowardly stop being the one directly above). Current plan which will never happen is no digital in Maine for two weeks this summer beyond phone in case a loved one needs to reach me, my dreaming about doing this fully aware I'm incapable of doing so just punishment as is thinking if I can get through 2024 then 2025 will be less electric by dint of recent election and I can be less compulsively sideways as if I don't enjoy being sideways but just can't help it, witness this grid I just harvested, something's gotta change, I just wish I have an alternative to yes but for the worse

Biden: ‘Israel Has An Obligation Not To Harm My Reelection Chances’
Brutal, Chaotic War – Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased
"Importantly, it is not *remotely* unusual for people to care about issues/causes that don’t benefit them materially, or cost them. It only surprises those trapped in a paradigm of “interest” derived from classical political economy that never described how people really behave."
Also too: because it reminds us that there but for privilege is me and mine and will be delivered upon us when we lose that privilege							⇧
Am I going to vote in Maryland primary, but Vote Uncommitted Maryland? No, but now not a Fuck No
Meetings about massacre					Sick cultures
Gaza And The Corporate Media
Netanyahu killed a top Iranian general in Syria to provoke a regional conflict — and the U.S. media is hiding his true motivation
"One thing that's happening at the moment is that zionist ultras are making arguments in public that they've previously only made in private to already sympathetic audiences. but these arguments fall flat in the general arena. which amusingly they don't seem to have noticed"
Review: A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation
Donald Trump’s Amnesia Advantage
Extractivism in the Anthropocene
Beyond Left Melancholy: Understanding the psychological toll of political defeat
What the Next Civil War Will Look Like
Killing and its names				Why capitalism won't save the world
Six Degrees of Plant Extinction
How a DC stream became a sewer, and then a secret
Reason # 73946109 I don't want to move to Michigan: sheriffs
CHEAP ‘N PAINLESS LESSONS IN WRITING, SESSION #5: THE KITSCH-BALANCE
STOP MVP: Artists From WV, VA & NC Against The Mountain Valley Pipeline
{ feuilleton }'s				Maggie's weekly
Clay Pigeon's real name is Kasy Ross
yes you said no				Time explained
Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction
THE INCOMPARABLE MOJO NIXON
Tree, Chair, Cone, Dog, Bishop, Piano, Vineyard, Door, or Penny: On Lyn Hejinian
The Best Neil Young Songs, Ranked

THE PHANTOM AGENTS

John Ashbery

We need more data r: our example, earth - how it would behave in a 
crisis, under pressure,
or simply on a day no one had staked out for unrest
to erupt. What season would fit its lifestyle
most naturally? Who would the observers, the control group be?

For this we must seek the answer in decrepit cinemas
whose balconies were walled off decades ago: on the screen
(where, in posh suburbia, a woman waits)
under the seats, in the fuzz and ancient vomit and gumwrappers;
or in the lobby, where yellowing lobby cards announce
the advent of next week's Republic serial: names
of a certain importance once, names that float
in the past, like a drift of gnats on a summer evening.

Who in the world despises our work
as much as we do? I was against campaigning again,
then my phone started ringing off the hook. I tell you...
But to come back to us, sanded down to the finer grain
and beyond - this is what books teach you, but also
what we must do. Make a name, somehow,
in the wall of clouds behind the credits, like a
twenty-one-vehicle pileup on a fog-enclosed highway.
This is what it means to be off and running, off
one's nut as well. But in a few more years,
with time off for good behavior...