Baby, Said the Girlfriend, Moments Before Lapsing into a Shamanic Seizure, I Need You to Conduct a Longitudinal Analysis to Understand the Correlation Between Despair and Genital Laughter

In latest Harper's, May 2015 issue, a What Went Wrong with Obama cover piece written by David Bromwich. I haven't read yet, mostly because I didn't discover it in a pile of mail until last night, but a bit now by Why? Harper's pulls bullet quotes off each page and highlights in margin, here they are in order:

• It is one thing to know that you follow the path of least resistance. It is another to say so in public.
• Obama believed that his power as an interpreter of the American Dream was on the order of Reagan's.
• In his first years in office, Obama displayed the political equivalent of dead nerve endings.
• Much of the disarray in foreign policy was inevitable once Obama resolved that his would be a "team of rivals."
• Democrats have never properly realized that foreign entanglements set limits on what is possible at home.
• A strain of quietism has been a recurrent and uneasy motif of Obama's presidency. But the trait is deeply rooted.
• Obama has spared himself the illegality of torture by killing the suspects his predecessor would have kidnapped.
• Obama has taken care not to disturb the American concensus that Iran is a uniquely dangerous country.
• "The Obama Administration," Snowden said, "almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community."
• Nobody bent on mere manipulation would so often utter a wish for things he could not carry out.

Here is the final sentence: Much as one would like to admire a leader so good at showing that he means well, and so earnest in projecting the good intentions of his country as the equivalent of his own, it would be a false consolation to pretend that the years of the Obama presidency have not been a large lost chance.

At what? I will or won't read it in full, I'm sure bullet quotes highlight the gist. I post this not to rage but to count to ten, yet - I'm weird about this, I admit - the absence of the words "bankers" and "Wall Street" in the bullet quotes strikes me. Maybe I'm wrong - and here I now commit myself to reading the peace and will tell you if my assumptions are wrong - but while Bromwich is mad at Obama for being a foreign policy pussy, I'm angry Obama's working more steadfastly than he's been steadfast for anything towards the coming Corporate fleecing of my daughter's future.

UPDATE! There is one paragraph re: Triskelions, ends with this sentence: But it was Obama's choice to put Lawrence Summers at the head of his economic team. It's one paragraph out of many, and not nearly as critical of Obama on this issue as critical on most others, but I said I'd tell you if it was mentioned.

When we visited Ann Arbor for Air's senior Art show there were firemen in the tended "woods" of the campus slowly controlled-burning the "woods" underbrush. Air said they do it every early spring, to kill ticks, invasive plant species, maintain the illusion of woods for aesthetic purposes? we speculated. I confess, in regards to future Obama Legacy pieces from anyone of any stripe, this is a pre-burn post. It doesn't kill anything: new growth spurts. The invasive plant species tells me ignore this shit, I ignore what the invasive plant species tells me. As for aesthetic purposes, here is the regrown nail of my left big toe I bashed against a rock in creek at the bottom of a gulch in Shenandoah National Park late last June, I trimmed it for the first time since it fell off months ago last night!

• Zuptoyou, eye-wise.
• I do like Harper's, many is the artist or poet or writer I still find via Harper's. I will resubscribe enthusiastically when time.
• On the Bromwich article.
• What do insanely wealthy people buy?
• The rise and fall of ideologies.
• Form, content, transformation.
• On this generations greatest academic fraud. As always, I say that with admiration.
• The only moment we have is right now.
• This is the K to read.
• Krasznahorkai.
• Jim O'Rourke interview.

This from Borzutzky's in the murmurs of the rotten corpse economy, click, yo:

A World Where the "Conversion Pool" Saw Swimmers Step in White Robes from It's Farther End, Reborn to New Religion

Remember that? It's been years. I used it back during POTUS 08 when I was soddenly impressed with Obama the Gameplayer. What a dope. I was accosted this morning by an obamaphile, she's MWAR!! about tonight's SOTU, MWAR!! about Obama's recent Cuomo-conversion, she's MWAR!! about motherfucking POTUS 16 even if it's Hillary (she thinks Elizabeth Warren will be nominee). Am I going to watch the SOTU tonight? she gushingly asked. Did I say, Funny how he didn't give this progressive-rallying speech in 2010 or 2012 or 2014, that he waits until both he and his party are at their nadir of power, that of all the cynical speeches Obama has given this speech - if it is his Cuomo keynote - will be the most cynical? No. Even if I am not that dope now that I was in 2008 the dope I am now remembers that dope I was then. Even if I am not the dope now that I was three, four years ago when apostatic spasms spewed the words I did not bark today I remember the dope I was then. The dope I am in six years - the dope I am tomorrow - will remember the dope I am now who can't restrain himself this post.

• I couldn't resist tweeting out the above snark. I am small.
• And yes, while I've a myth that I am successfully running from I've yet to create a myth of what I am running towards.
• Charlie at any cost.
• Greece: the great leap rightward. Reminder: Greece is Britain in ten years, America in twenty.
• Projections of a dream.
• On MLK Day.
• Eschleman: Wound Interrogation.
• Robert Lowell writes to Peter Taylor, mentioned because when was the last time you thought of Peter Taylor?
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Occultism, farce, and Milton Babbitt.

SECOND THOUGHTS

Albert Goldbarth

. . . and then of course the weeping: some demurely, some

flamboyantly. Those elegiac tears, if shed

enough, will alter a face and the person

behind the face. We all know that erosion

is a mighty thing, and even—for example—

the seemingly permanent, hard-black Mississippi banks

undo and slip south. In a sense, the delta

at New Orleans—the land gone silt, and rebuilt—

is the Mississippi’s second thought. “My pet,

your wiles have altered my earlier obstinacy,

and the vision of you in your luxury stateroom beckons;

I shall join you for your voyage on the Gigantic

—what? oh. Titanic”—is a tragic second thought.

A happy one: when Skyler and I decided to try again

to “save the marriage.” Now we’re lazing in a pour

of Sunday morning light as orangely voluptuous

as marmalade. A simile’s a first thought,

then an equaled next. She slips back into sleep,

and now I’m reading about the night that shady London dandy

Charles Augustus Howell (1869) unshoveled the grave

at Highgate, broke the coffin, and looted her bone breast

of “the book in question, bound in rough gray calf, and with

red edges to the leaves,” on eager orders from Rossetti

—who’d had second thoughts in seven years, desiring

to publish now a volume of his verses (1870, Poems).

Lizzie’s death-stenched pages were saturated

with disinfectant by a medical practitioner “who

is drying them leaf by leaf”—and then they joined the world

of woven radish baskets, bobbered fishing skeins, and god dolls

in their second life as art on a museum wall; a world where

the “conversion pool” saw swimmers step in white robes

from its farther end, reborn to new religion; and the lumbering

land animals said no, and gave up legs, and so their legs rolled up

like stored-away and useless rugs inside them, and they returned

to the waters, and birthed and breached in the waters,

and made the waters their orchestral glory,

and spouted out their great Ionic columns of air and water

in the touch of the changing mind of Earth,

that’s sunlit at times

and at other times darkened. 

Color of Time Lost in Sparks, of Space Lost Inside Dance

• Michael Gira on the new Swans album: "Imagine a huge growth on the face of a beautiful child, and it’s kind of glowing. Then cut that growth off and flush it down the toilet. Well, that’s what it sounds like…"
• Return of >>Deleted Bleggalgazing<< Wasn't of the forlorn sort. The Fuck It is strong.
• Though I don't know how I unintentionally disabled the hover over links. Some of you have told me you use the hover before deciding whether to click through. If anyone has an idea of what I did and how to fix it please let me know. In meantime I will try harder to provide more info on what a link goes to if the link title isn't clear enough.
• On the 12-Point Platform: Primary Colors is all about the meta. And the meta is the wrong metric. There is only thing that matters: policy. Only policy brings concrete material benefits for voters, along with any structural reforms needed to bring those benefits into being. And a series of litmus tests -- a checklist -- like the 12 Point Platform provides a simple and proven metric to hold politicians accountable for policy. "More and better Democrats" doesn't mean squat if nobody knows what "better" means!
• Why isn't Dianne Feinstein called a traitor and whistleblower?
• Culture as straitjacket: For as much as Ruth Marcus detests the choice Belle Knox has made, her ignorance of the context of that choice emerges from a worldview that Ruth has internalized which defines sexuality as inherently offensive and holds that women must be effectively sexless to be “respectable”, the act only considered in hushed tones, behind closed doors, and only for the fulfillment of men. That erasing the agency of women is not seen as an insult while women reclaiming said agency is frowned upon is a sign of just how far we have to go as a society, regardless of how enlightened we claim to be. In trying to point at what she calls sign of a cultural abyss, Ruth Marcus effectively points at herself.
• Inferior musicians giving comfort to themselves: First we will deny you permission; then we won’t permit you to leave. This is why people find it so hard to believe that people of faith desire only to be left alone, to be allowed to run their adoption agencies, parochial schools, and sacramental marriage ceremonies without outside interference; live and let live;  à chacun son goût; il faut cultiver notre jardin; um, etc. The plea to be allowed to be particular pairs poorly with an evangelical universalism; the desire to be granted liberty frequently shades into a wish to become its grantor; you shall have no other gods beside me, or before me, becomes rather more ominously, there shall be no other gods.
• First as funny, then as die: five points on the Obama/Galifianakis show.

)

• How much meat is too much meat?
• History made queasy: Taylor’s passing inspired a good deal of speculation. Some claimed typhoid carried the chief executive off; others, arsenic. Investigations failed to clear up the matter, and consensus eventually settled on run of the mill food poisoning as cause. Cucumbers, cherries, unpasteurized milk, green apples — anything Taylor had eaten that Independence Day could have been the culprit. Even the water he drank attracted suspicion, the capital’s sewage system then in a deplorable state. Whatever the fatal food, it lent truth to the observation made by Paracelsus some three centuries before: “Poison is in everything, and nothing is without poison.”
• Bleggalgazing and a call for Kindness.
• Brad's serial short story, part four.
• On Elbow and Elbow's new album. I really disliked Seldom Seen Kid after really liking what proceeded it. Will give the new one a fair audition.
• Opera from the other side: on the history of stage production.
• Yes, the keyboardist's schtick gets old fast, but the music, I cannot urge the new collected Sparks on you enough. They'd completely fallen of my radar, what a dope.

)



MARS BEING RED

Marvin Bell

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.



)

Dogs and Crocodiles, Sunlamps

Hey, that's new Wye Oak.

I caught myself late last night reading from the New York Review of Books blog Jeff Madrick's analysis of Obama's SOTU from Tuesday night and by extension his presidency as a whole. I responded strongly, actually c/p-ing a couple of paragraphs into this very blog post and adding comments. Before reading the article I'd had drinks with a friend, a staunch Obama supporter who insists on what staunch Obama supporters insist upon. We enjoyed the squabble way too much. This is two-way snark: He started it and persisted when I initially voiced disinterest in our old game, but once taunted I insisted on what obamapostates insist upon with the passionate obstinance that makes hearing others' impassioned obstinance hard to hear. Neither my friend's nor my passionate obstinance will be reported here, I didn't hear what he had to say though I know what he said, he didn't hear what I had to say though he knows what I said, you know what he said, you know what I said, and there will not be paragraphs from Madrick's post nor my now deleted responses to them. Since I hope (but am not hopeful) this paragraph's last sentence is true this needs saying one more time: Madrick's point of view is a good example of my friend's (and once and always my) rationalizing a hero's failures, or at least this hero. I'm always horny for the possibilities of the next false hero, am hornier for my next apostasy just like the last, just like the next. I'm hoping (if not hopeful) this is the last time I post another version of this paragraph, or at least the part about Obama.

Hey, this is older Wye Oak.

• Pete Seeger and the avant garde. Silliman's re-posting of his article from 1987.
• Neil Halstead playing some Slowdive songs.
• My favorite Neil Halstead song ever.
• Slight housekeeping note: updated the blogrolls: moved more moribund to moribund, added a couple of new sites to both New Gags, please check them out as they float to the top.
• That moribund list is going to be the largest blogroll on the blog within a year if current trends in Blegsylvania continue.
• Mr Alarum sent me this article on a new record store opening in Georgetown and asking if I wanted to go on a field trip. Yes, I do. Orpheus was the headshop where I bought bongs after Sights and Sounds closed.
• Lordy, Jack Spicer. If I played My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with poets....
• My favorite book of anything is this century is Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me, which of course he wrote last century.
• It would be my favorite book of last century too.
• This Wye Oak song and the two below via Richard, who gave me Wye Oak when I didn't know them.

A RED WHEELBARROW

Jack Spicer

Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever
It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
For their significance.
For their significant. For being human
The signs escape you. You, who aren't very bright
Are a signal for them. Not,
I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
Their significance. 

That Tired Magic about How Atoms of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven Did Their Fleet Anachronistic Dance in Every Inhalation of Ours, or: Born Two-Hundred Thirty-Three Years Ago Today

• Unsurprisingly to me, I love the late Sonatas best.
• Walter invited us over, he wanted to see us before he dies.
• It's us or them.
• Lordy, people (a) watch 60 Minutes and (b) are surprised 60 Minutes ran a positive promo for NSA and (c) are outraged by positive promo?
• The kiss.
• New Inquiry's Sunday reads.
• The madness of the planets.
• Peaches particularly admires Anne Carson.
• a wonder of indifferent efficiency.
• Winter.
• Report from a Pere Ubu home concert. $1000, those of you who've been in my house can vouch that the big room, with Earthgirl's studio for a balcony, would be excellent, all I need do is get past the mortification I would feel as a slurpy fanboy so I can start soliciting attendees.

THE POEM OF THE LITTLE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF MISAPPREHENSION AND MARVEL

Albert Goldbarth

During Napoleon iii’s coup d’état one of  his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, “Ma sacrée toux! (my damned cough).” But his lieutenant, understanding him to say “Massacrez tous! (massacre them all),” gave the order to fire, killing thousands—needlessly.
                   —Guy Murchie

“He was mortared to death.”

A pity, how we misspeak and mishear.

—Or “martyred”? Not that/coin-flip/either

makes a difference to the increasingly cooler

downtick of a corpse’s cells. “We heard the crazy mating joy

of the loon across the water.” Yes, but what

do we know, amateurs that we are? Loon, shmoon.

It might have been dying, announcing

its pain in those trilling pennants. It might

have been the girl who was lost in these woods last week

and never found by the volunteer searchers,

it might have been her ghost

with an admonishment. The truth is,

even among ourselves we often can’t distinguish pain

from pleasure, not in our beds, our hearts, the tone

of a poem on the final exam (a coin-toss). A pity, because

we know the urgency of some utterance;

and the intended goodwill of our listening; and

the marvelous basic mechanics of speech,

of lung: 300 million alveoli that, “if spread out flat,”

as my eighth-grade science teacher preened, “would come to

750 square feet, the entire floor space of an average house,”

and she added that tired magic about how atoms

of Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Beethoven did

their fleet anachronistic dance in every inhalation

of ours, although at thirteen I preferred to think

that the atoms of Cleopatra’s body—my Cleopatra,

inflating her see-through empresswear

with husky breaths—commingled with my blood, and also

realized in my own dim way it wasn’t only Einstein,

Shakespeare, Madame Curie populating my oxygen,

but also the smelly and scabby old man

from across the street who’d died last year

when the late-shift ward nurse heard (as she said in her testimony)

“med injection” instead of (as the outgoing

ward nurse told her) “bed inspection”—altogether

an unfortunate example of my theme . . . although

exempla abound, misapprehension

also dancing inside us at the atomic level.

Someone thought the gate was locked, she always locked

the gate in the late afternoon when the haze set down

and the sun for a moment seemed to carmelize the lake top,

so the gate was locked; except that it wasn’t,

and seven days into it nobody’s found the girl

or a scraggle of hair or a single ribbon. I tell you

we’re amateurs, we’re sometimes bungling amateurs,

of the minutiae of our own lives. When I heard the sounds

that gurgled from my chest as my wife was leaving

into the dense, conspiratorial Austin, Texas night,

I couldn’t have said if it was defeat

or relief. She couldn’t have said which one

she’d have been happiest to cause. We only knew

that I’d been wrong at times, and she’d been wrong at times,

and that our total errors, if spread out flat,

become the house we live in. They’re another system

inside us, along with the cardiac and the pulmonary,

they’re moving us toward the horizon line. And when

enough errors accumulate there, that’s what

we call the future. Even now, as you read this,

someone in that unknowable distance

is breathing you in. 

The Tender Forests Sigh, and the Soft Whirr of the Hygrometer Promises Oxidation of Iron, or: Born One-Hundred Five Years Ago Today

• Olivier Messiaen was born 105 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. 
• The interest-divergence dilemma between tech companies and NSA.
• Readers' supplement to Chris Hedge's piece on the white-hatting of Snowden.
• Against the police.
• When I visit the old iterations of this blog to search for a song or a poem (like I did for the Messiaen piece below the bullets, above the poem) I look at the blogrolls there to see both who I was reading and what I was writing to reflect on where I was then versus where I am now. Fuck, I once blogrolled the asshole TBogg in pathetic hopes his Malkin-Baiting Overlordness would recognize my existence. What a puny and craven partisan fuck I was. Point of this bullet being, of the Left Blegsylvanian Bleggal Overlords I once read daily I think the only one I still read regularly is Atrios, who's had his apostasies, perhaps not as severe as mine, but fuck more than most of those overlords I desperately wanted to notice me. Disclosure - he did me a few Kinds.
• For instance, Corrente finds two I no longer read.
• Which is not to suggest I'm not a puny and craven fuck now, I just don't root for the team in the bullet below anymore.
• Asshole hires asshole to try and save asshole's ass. 
• Blessed are the idiots.
• Change the world without taking power?
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Fissure.
• 2013 end game.

SESTINA: AS THERE ARE SUPPORT GROUPS, THERE ARE SUPPORT WORDS

Albert Goldbarth

The name of his native country pronounced on a distant shore
could not please the ears of a traveller more than hearing
the words “nitrogen,” “oxidation of iron” and “hygrometer.” —Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century scientist-explorer

When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire,

one longs to hear the cry “Hygrometer!

Fresh hygrometer for sale!” Yes, and when the fair

sex sidles close and coyly murmurs “nitrogen”

into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation

is very easy. The allurements of a local siren,

whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron

favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure,

evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer

at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor

and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen.

Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation

from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation

difficult to sustain. I think of my grandmother: “We're not hirin’

today” “Go away” “Dumb Jew”—her share

of the language that greeted her here in the land of alien hygrometer

and freedom, where she was only one more funny-skirted for-

eigner yearning to hear a lulling Hungarian nitrogen

hum her to sleep. Eventually, of course, the American nitrogen

sufficed. Her daughter could speak, in free translation,

both uranium and argon; and her granddaughter gigs with Fire ’n

Ice, a skinhead punk-grunge group that performs in sheer

black nighties and clown wigs—she plays mean electric hygrometer

in the first set and then, for a twofer,

(very American, that) plays paper-and-comb. Far

out. She’s so fluent in various World Wide Webbery that nitrogen

in a thousand different inflections is her birthright, and almost any translation,

mind to mind, gender to gender, is second nature. “I earn

my keep, I party, I sleep” is her motto. Though she’s for-

tunate in having a lover who’s CEO at Hygrometer,

Potassium, Klein & Wong: it helps to pay the “hygrometer

man” when he knocks at the door. I won’t say that they fear

this guy exactly, but he’s a major badass nitrogen-

sucking cyberwired ninja-kicking shitheel (or, translation:

call him Sir). It makes one pine for a land where the birds all choir in

sweetly trilling melodies on a flower-scented shore,

and a translation sings all night. Row gen-

tly toward it. The tender forests sigh, and the soft whirr

of the hygrometer promises oxidation of iron. 

I Believe I Have Acceded with Docility to Aesthetic Laws

• Is Michael Nesmith one of the greatest underrated musicians of our time? That's a Michael Nesmith song above, btw.
• When I was eight years old and my brother Elric and I played The Monkees with my cousins Jennifer and Wayne-Matthew, I was always Dolenz, Jennifer always Jones, Elric always Tork, Wayne-Matthew always Nesmith. Or visa versa on Elric Nesmith Wayne-Matthew Tork. Dolenz and Jones, via television, were the stars, Jennifer and me the oldest.
• When professors oppose unions.
• How academia resembles a drug gang.
• I've made a conscious if unsuccessful effort to drop the running haranguing gags re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest, but, re: power wins the whatever the fuck contest. The mulitple actors on multiple stages infrequently change, the plot never. Still, as I predicted - as did others - the NSA leaks strengthen power, doesn't diminish power, he types into his self-incrimination google machine.
• Home of the Whopper.
• Man, conqueror of Nature, dead at 408.
• The last thing you'll see if you're eaten to death by a penguin.
• This week in water.
• Wheaton skyline!
• VW tells DCU to fuck off. Pint bet the next shirt says Indonesia, either the country or the airline. Though Thorir might wait until he rebrands United and changes the kits to red to add the Indonesia.
• Waggish's books of the year.
• Sheepish.
• Rethinking E.E. Cummings.
• Yes, this is a Michael Nesmith song:

HEIR APPARENT

Lyn Hejinian

Thing now tone, aquatic tilt is real, stick and money thieve, turn the future,
          scratch gas, cricket

Listen

Little spider darting out from a hiding place behind a rolodex and racing to
          a cranny between piles of papers: something we saw, wanting it to
          come back, or wanting it to go, like a king when royalty is outmoded

Glenn Gould is still humming along like a Volkswagen on an autobahn

One day a mournful young man spat on a traffic cop’s shoe, but the man’s
          name was Ferdinando and the cop’s name was Matilda, and they
          lived together happily ever after

Actually, I am not addressing myself here to metaphysicians, nor to spirits,
          nor to pedants, because none of these know how to see the
          particular beauty of a rain-soaked field

I believe I have acceded with docility to aesthetic laws—so says Odilon
          Redon, but to what in the world around us might those laws
          pertain?

All good children envy mint, so tune your instruments accordingly, because
          mint is as obstinate as a god

A celebration takes place and in surprise my error is corrected

Parsimonious ethnicity, cowardly mind, constraining gender, uninherited
          class, deracinated citizenship

You are so tired and I am so timing and he is so tidy and then there are
          those others, all so tithed and tipped-off and titanic

Help, I’m clinging to the side of a cliff, gripping a crumpling outcropping of
          rock, a train is rumbling through the valley below, a passenger
          looks up

Then two tiny birds darted (jetted? bulleted? sped!) from one tree to
          another and I could see a band or spot of yellow on each, but they
          were too little and too fast for me and who cares about
          identification?

I am very busy, I have a lot of energy, I’ve got a lot of projects underway,
          I’ve a number of plans, I’m very active, I’m industrious, productive

*****

Cat in the redwood, chasing pie

Now in a sequence is a consequence, right?

Fred laughs, Ferdie scowls, Finnian drums, but whatever it is that Clarissa
          Shirley Jemma Moore does is whatever only she knows and maybe
          she doesn’t

You have only to slide some sprigs of thyme after the shallot and lemon
          into the cavity

In the tale the dachshund wears boots and the little girl, its companion, has
          a purse that replenishes itself with money whenever she buys
          kibble, cookies, or fruit

War warrant plate daring too doesn’t didn’t sum it

An autobiography offers a gloss to a life, but it’s a translator’s gloss, full of
          misunderstandings

She dared to ask and get canny and deride servility and temper glass and
          scatter candies, and that was a mighty horsewoman indeed, and she
          rode with chocolate spurs

I wouldn’t say particles exactly, I couldn’t capture particles of any single
          lifetime, because there is no single lifetime nor solid anchor nor
          sweaty pathos that doesn’t end up at the bottom of some sea

Slowly she swiftly turns and all that was said is to be long considered

The present cannot decipher

Make it language then, with no pictures

The ponderous sun hangs as rose and cream white fruits must if student
          loans doom college graduates to poverty

A love scout, that’s the term, is he or she who sometimes finds mourners,
          sometimes celebrants, sometimes children, sometimes no one at all

*****

Suppose ungainly twigs, somewhat

Lished itivity tent ample crates

You disappear into a duration, the where and while of which is called
          Heedlessness, Indifference, Absence, Mischief

Yesterday, let’s go out; tomorrow, we were kept indoors, now let’s eat
          grapes

Suppose the poet speaks and the language doesn’t answer

The passion has its turf but, whoops!—I thought it was better managed
          than that!

Nobody moves in the photograph, nor will they ever move

Rally roll and then the little girl went up the tree

Into an L-shaped alley the young son strolls harboring a month’s provisions
          in his velvet portmanteau

The radiator knocks, the jump rope knots

Digestion proceeds as we sleep, and it is for this reason that we fart upon
          waking

It had been raining for three days in that interstitial environment, home to
          local fauns, where men come out of oaks dark, smart, and with a
          hint of criminality

Speculate for me

One a tree, softly, two a right eye, tenderly, three a threshold, kindly, four
          a mallard, fortuitously

*****

Isn’t worry wooden?

Appearances burn to perfection, the same old frolic, permanent atoms
          becoming astronauts and then unbecoming them again

There was never and will be never and once she was like a gazelle
          commanding a field

Violent is the violin, deep is the speed with which the Great Wall of China
          wanders, serene is the soot far up the chimney venting the smoke
          from the “Longlife Log”

The sun keeps its secret, the daily news is sunk in light

This is a melody played on a cock harmonica, lyrics lost in a story buried
          under a bellicose rock

Could she and why?

What butter!

The barefoot musician fiddles on the ice with greater weight over the years
          and the juggler’s jugs get lighter

It’s not from an aphorism that you’d want our memories to rise—you’d
          resist, persist, preside

Life is full of indubitable data, indelicate stuff

Though drawn to the claims of the sky, I duck my vertigo and devour a
          huge sandwich, my commitment to gravity, which holds my shadow
          to the ground

We are subject to the ultimate disorientation, a cloud of invisible power

The sun is surefire

*****

She stilled cream-colored stones an eternity ago and one bird flying there
          too

This is a pictograph of sediment not sentiment, of unbound layers of mud
          not the sold ore of South African gold

It is said that seven sleepers slumbered for two centuries and then woke up

The dead have mixed

Writers dowse in books, and being one I find that the first two words on
          page 203 of the book are Wilfred Owen’s (bent double) and the first
          two on page 307 are Auden’s (amid rustle)—magic!

What might a demographer dare?

Behold the scooters and riders and divers, scooting and riding and diving up

The young woman on tiptoe said and we didn’t doubt

What’s desirable then isn’t writable—there are more walls than trees there

Clerk, haven’t you a pen with pigs in it?

Okay, I’m leaning back, as if that would help me remember from pungency
          and acerbic comments relegating Natasha Rostov to the makeshift
          stages of a sitcom, but I fall—off that stage!

Butter jumps

Curmudgeon

The autobiographical isn’t renewable—so who is she?

He Will Not Remember the Names of Cousins and Uncles

Here's the SunnO))) cascade I promised. Reiteration of duh. I have moved to the next stage of my obamapostasy: I can't imagine myself neener-neenering emotionally devastated Hillarmy's (go register Hillarmy.every extension at GoDaddy, I name it and relinquish claims on trademark, yo) moral outrage over the Democracy-threatening secrecy of the Christie administration. I read Jennifer Rubin for the same reason I watch natural disaster porn, here is her sloppiest, laziest, no doubt she thinks her most brilliant trolling on wapoblog ever since the last until the next. Yes, more politics today than recently. I'm going to a wedding in Norfolk this weekend, a cousin I wouldn't recognize if introduced but a son of my favorite aunt and uncle, want to bleed any excess aargh-fluid out of the political spleen just in case Earthgirl and I decide to get shit-faced and politics, as they inevitably will among the shit-faced, come up. For I swear I am keeping my mouth shut regardless. SeatSix can vouch I succeeded or failed next Sunday or Monday.

• The state versus John: Last week I had the unusual experience of being cross-examined at length by the State on the content of many of my blog posts here, in the course of a post-conviction proceeding. Although this line of questioning was objected to on grounds of relevance, it was not unexpected, and the State justified its inquisition on the grounds that my “credibility” was at issue. It was gratifying to know that at least one person was still reading this blog. And it would not surprise me if in the near future other authorities take an interest as well, as a result of this prosecutor’s interest. I think I explained myself, for the record, as well as could be expected in that format and environment, and as well as Heresy is ever able to justify itself to Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this is as good a time and opportunity as any to summarize the views I’ve expressed here over the last few years, which have evolved some but not much since the last time I posted.
• Event Planner.
• Obscure Sound's Best of November, with sound.
• Bodah reads another Hejinian poem on his weekly radio show.
• E-Literacy and the Social: It often seems that autopoiesis and self-reference play a crucial role in the basic understanding of e-literature, which the established scholarship (e.g. e-literary criticism) considers first and foremost in terms of its new media specificity. This practice is distinctly contextualized and embedded in contemporary society and its paradigm shifts. In the present time, defined by capitalism, which does not leave anything outside of its influence, there is also no point in leaving the e-literary text outside, i.e. without any references to "the social" and to theories that deal with new social and cultural paradigms. The challenge of broader social theory application in this field is therefore the current topic of interest in this essay. To emphasize the specificity of an e-literary piece (as a performance, event, procedure, program, ride, textual instrument) directs us to its materiality, which is a very historical, changeable category. The requirements for full autonomy of this field as separated from the social (the claim of modernist aesthetics), have passed. Today we recognize that software is also a cultural and social tool (Galloway, 2012). In this essay, we are going to discuss some key theoretical notions on the issue of  "the social" at the present time and their application in the field of e-literature.
• The most horrifying sentence you'll read today.
• Three new Ashbery poems.
• Flowers of Abeyance.

GRADATIONS OF BLUE

Matthea Harvey

The scent of pig is faint tonight

as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue,

looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard

with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten.

Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed

I was still soft-fingered when I planted you.

In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds,

pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests

on the plane’s wing-tip colored pink by the sun.

Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo,

like the hawk that usually flies between or above their branches,

found skimming the ground with its catch of mouse or mole,   

or the barge that passes every day at four, its metal nose

just out of the water, while empty at eight, its sleek sides

flash signals to those on shore. Later, on the highway

a row of trucks lit like orange squares in the setting sun—

a colony of ants each with a piece of chrysanthemum

on their backs—begins to reassemble memories;

the petals become lining, the shape of the flower is lost,

so that years later, looking at an old photograph,

she will not remember the names of cousins and uncles

but the exact bend in the river behind them, the pattern of trees.

The Laws the Linguists Thought Up Were Particularly Lissome, Full of Magical Loopholes that Spit Out Medals

Found my Bevis Frond stash looking for something else. Hey, Wednesday officially begins the five slowest days of the year in Blegsylvania, bar none, something that didn't occur to me until after I'd spent too much time on this post. One of the days, because I promise myself a Stereolab cascade every time I note that I don't play enough Stereolab here (like I did last week) considering how much I like and listen to Stereolab, so tomorrow or Friday, cascade. Requests solicited, I know at least one of you, if you're tuned in over the holiday, dig Stereolab. Requests for other cascades solicited, this being the slowest five days of the year in Blegsylvania.

• My recently deceased Aunt Julia (a run of 97 years, I'd buy that right now), a kind if stern women and the most devout conservative Catholic I've personally known would hate this pope, which means he must be preaching (as in sales-pitching for his Corporation, I know, don't get me wrong) something that pisses off devout conservative Catholics, which I admit I'm still small enough to enjoy.
• Pope Francis or Karl Marx? Posted not only because of the above but because (a) unkind comment about the fellow blogger and blog linked to related to blogging and my edict to myself not to link to her and (b) fucking facebook and (c) what does this say about my priorities between my bleggal principles and my jones for an echo to a point? 
• My jones for an echo to a point: regardless of whether Jorge Bergoglio is sincere and genuinely desires to move the Catholic Church in the direction I would applaud or whether Jorge Bergoglio is a skilled and cynical barker preaching populist biscuits to the world's billions of disenfranchised that comprise the future survival of Catholic Corporation (and of course he is an infinite combination of both, like we all are), wouldn't it be nice if Jorge Bergoglio is enough of an independent rube that Catholic power-brokers are scared the puppet they cast as pope might break kayfabe?
• Obama's new constraint. Hey! yesterday was Kill List Tuesday!
• Obama threw a party! and held an off-the-record meeting with MSNBC hosts and liberal pundits on Thursday, POLITICO has learned. Present at the meeting: MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Lawrence O'Donnell, Washington Post economics blogger Ezra Klein, Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum, Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta, Salon political writer Brian Beutler and Fox News contributor Juan Williams.
• Judd Legum? A peanut in the Beverly Hillbillies?
• A fake slum for luxury tourists?

• There are new sites on many of the blogrolls, please check them out when they rise to the top.
• Literary recipes (quite astonishing).
• One more new project.
• Steven Moore interview.
• I am unfamiliar with Elizabeth Jennings, which I can fix.
• I am unfamiliar with Mary Burger, which I can fix.
• The eight of swords.
• Mervyn Peake. I've a dear friend whose love of Peake has prompted me to try Gormenghast repeatedly, alas, without success.
• Tull, REM, Throwing Muses, and a rumination.
• Sunno))) which I haven't played here in a while, perhaps a cascade this weekend, the slowest five days of the year in Blegsylvania.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR 3

Matthea Harvey

The generalissimo's glands directed him
to and fro. Geronimo! said the über-goon
we called God, and we were off to the races.
Never mind that we could only grow
grey things, that inspecting the horses' gums
in the gymnasium predicted a jagged
road ahead. We were tired of hard news—
it helped to turn down our hearing aids.
We could already all do impeccable imitations
of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on
a steak as he said there's an intimacy to invasion.
That much was true. When we got jaded
about joyrides, we could always play games
in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.
Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick
the Kidney were our favorites. The laws
the linguists thought up were particularly
lissome, full of magical loopholes that
spit out medals. When we ran out of room
on our uniforms, we pinned them to
our mourning bands, to our mops.
We had made the big time, but night nipped
at our heels. The navigator's needle swung
strangely, oscillating between the oilwells
and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves
together by practicing quarterback sneaks
along the pylons, but the race to the ravine
was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.'s
and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight
of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

Every Idea I Have Is Nostalgia

And with that I complete the second half of a goading (though payment won't be until at least next week), plus provide a detailed account and and review, with observations and bleggal theorizing, on yesterday's mass migration of sites moribund on live blogrolls to moribund on the new blogroll called Moribund (the burgermeister).  I cheated - two of the three sub-poems were already written. I am again reminded that I don't do Fuck-It well, my first instinct as always to immediately apply rules to anything supposedly ruleless, the defining and applying of rules more fun than playing without them.

• Was reminded of Jessica Bailiff last night on Mandl's show.
• Zing! The Bayern Munich coach Pep Guardiola had little time to celebrate his team's 3-0 league win at Borussia Dortmund on Saturday, threatening instead to uncover a mole he said has been leaking team details to the media. "It does not matter who it is, heads will roll," Guardiola was quoted in the Bild newspaper as having told his players after the game, angry that tactics had made their way into the press before the game. "I will throw him out. He will not play under me again." The club's chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge confirmed the existence of a mole, saying he should stop or face action from the club. "We will obviously not bring in the NSA [National Security Agency] to find out who it is," Rummenigge told Sky television. "But I advise him to stop doing it or he will have a serious problem not only with Pep Guardiola, but also the entire club."
• How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon.
• Women's justice in New Mexico.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• I have no idea why this would be, but since moving the moribund to their own locale the blog seems to be loading much faster.
• Szybist interview: I experiment a lot. Sometimes I allow poems to work toward their form; sometimes I begin with form to provide what Lyn Hejinian describes as an intentional ‘field of inquiry’ in which to improvise. For me, to write a poem is to experiment with form, or experiment with how different limitations provoke different kinds of language, different imaginations. 
• Requiem for a wood sprite.
• Chrostowska? Good thing I have access to a university library.
• Happy Birthday, Prunella! Her latest playlist has the guy with whom she shares a birthday. I confess I don't know as much about Mark Lanegan's music as I should, and who the hell does birthdays on blog anyway?

THE TROUBADOURS ETC

Mary Szybist

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.

Not their curtsies or cross-garters

or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens

promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads

through metal contraptions to eat.

We've followed West 84, and what else?

Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,

lounging sheep, telephone wires,

yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,

the violet underneath of clouds.

Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:

there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—

darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound

with the thunder of their wings.

After a while, it must have seemed that they followed

not instinct or pattern but only

one another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,

they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.

And when we stop we'll follow—what?

Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love

only through miracle,

but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,

how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.

The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.

Think of me in the garden, humming

quietly to myself in my blue dress,

a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,

though cloudless.

At what point is something gone completely?

The last of the sunlight is disappearing

even as it swells—

Just for this evening, won't you put me before you

until I'm far enough away you can

believe in me?

Then try, try to come closer—

my wonderful and less than.

I Had the Happy Idea That the Dog Digging a Hole in the Yard in the Twilight Had His Nose Deep in Mold-Life

• Penderecki turned eighty yesterday.
• Decoding the ideological bullshit of a bourgeois simpleton, part one.
• Optimism of the will has come to represent denial of reality.
• Elizabeth Drew's obamapostasy, of a sort. Going into the mid-terms and POTUS 16 this will be the Democrats rallying cry: Obama: incompetent and puny, not evil.
• Foucault (for those of you who do) on the state.
• On false flags.
• Bleggalstuff: in a preposterous waste of time for reasons you don't want to hear about and signifying more to me than you want to hear about, I'm going to create a cemetery(s) for sites on the blogrolls that haven't posted in more than six months. Alright, I'm going to tell you two of the thirteen reasons I just scribbled down: one, Blegsylvania fascinates me - have I mentioned this before? - and two, when zombies arise I sometimes miss them in the mass of the living. No one is going to be purged and, btw, there are three new places added within the past week, look for them as they float to the top.
• UPDATE! And immediately there are questions. The first blog I click on to get URL to transfer to Moribund has gone private, so while the URL works to a log-in, the site is unavailable to me, and the feed comes in nameless. I've renamed it and added it since it's presumably alive (and as an aside, I think I know why it went private). The third blog I clicked on is dead and gone, as is does not exist anymore. What to do? This may be more interesting (to me and probably me alone) than I thought it would be.
• This is on the radio as I type this sentence:

• Why does Metro suck?
• Kensington's best bartender.
• Food links. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Beckett and Coetzee, for those of you who do.
• The views expressed do not necessarily reflect..... Adding, the GbV comment has been expressed to me by a few over the years too.
• I think Mary Szybist, poem below, is going to be this coming week's obsession.
• I think Dean Roberts is going to be this coming week's obsession:

HAPPY IDEA

Mary Szybist

I had the happy idea to suspend some blue globes in the air

and watch them pop.

I had the happy idea to put my little copper horse on the shelf so we could stare at each other

all evening.

I had the happy idea to create a void in myself.

Then to call it natural.

Then to call it supernatural.

I had the happy idea to wrap a blue scarf around my head and spin.

I had the happy idea that somewhere a child was being born who was nothing like Helen or

Jesus except in the sense of changing everything.

I had the happy idea that someday I would find both pleasure and punishment, that I would

know them and feel them,

and that, until I did, it would be almost as good to pretend.

I had the happy idea to call myself happy.

I had the happy idea that the dog digging a hole in the yard in the twilight had his nose deep in

mold-life.

I had the happy idea that what I do not understand is more real than what I do,

and then the happier idea to buckle myself

into two blue velvet shoes.

I had the happy idea to polish the reflecting glass and say

hello to my own blue soul. Hello, blue soul. Hello.

It was my happiest idea.

Once There Was a Detective on a Bridge Who Longed to Tell Everyone Everything He Knew and Therefore He Started Running Across the Bridge as Fast as He Could

Most important things first: the new Juana Molina is out Wednesday.

For an hour or so yesterday half the youtubes on this blog wigged out, showed an error message (I paraphrase): Haha, we fucked up, thousands of monkey's are working to fix it. No really, it did say monkeys were working to fix it. Thank you, monkeys, everything seems fine now. I don't know if it was blogger or youtube or Daddy Google that produced the quirk. Now that Daddy Google rules the world and says its children have to play with each other or else all Google's children act skeevy.

I got three emails from friends, each slobbering to tell me, hey, have you seen your blog, IT'S FUCKED UP! See the last line in the Franz Wright poem on Sunday's post. Heh! sorry to disappoint, I didn't go blogspastic, I saw the fucked-up youtubes, I thought, fuck my free blogging platform, it'll fix itself or not, fuck it. Didn't run to the abandoned wordpress blog and hissy-fit the google-fart. Once, always until as recently as early last summer (during the Renew Domain Name in Blogger episode), I would have. Since the youtubes did fix themselves I've no way to prove what I'd do right now as you read this, hours after the event, if blooger was still broken. I'm certain the fuck it wouldn't be as relaxed and unconcerned. The fuck-up occurred at the back-up blogger blog too, so when I say that spiritually that blog is no longer the back-up blog, this is now the back-up blog (though you'll notice no difference in product or production because this is totally symbolic and important only to me), that's because I can manipulate the appearance there while I'm suffocating in green here because this blog's Apply to Template button is permanently broken, not because of yesterday's and today's and tomorrow's inevitable Daddy Google fuck up.

• Greenwald, Scahill, Rosen, and the price of one's journalistic soul.
• Omidyar media adviser in his own words.
• Creating sociopathic corporate leaders.
• Detroit as template for democracy's destruction.
• The passive aggressive rot sets in.
• This week in water.
• BRT!
• History of English in ten minutes.
• Juana Molina interview.

• Graham Chapman is still dead, but one last money grab.
• UPDATE! From the hallelujahs on twitter and blogs I am apparently the only person who doesn't think of this as a marvelous miracle. Forgive me, I took members seriously when they said there would be a reunion when Graham Chapman rose from the dead, forgive me, I'm a cynic, in light of those statements I question current motives. On top of which, reunions not only always suck compared to the original, they diminish the original by the reunion's suck.
• Purgatory/paradise. At least he's not on blooger.
• Earthgirl hired Planet's bestfriend's boyfriend to set up a professional looking website for her art work, he always uses wordpress. Will add to Me and Mine once it's up and running.
• He doesn't blame youtube.
• A blog called Golden Notebooks remembers Lessing.
• I announced that I wasn't going to worry that not only does Arcade Fire's music suck unto suck but that the band is comprised of insufferable poseurs, but they are making it fucking difficult.
• A friend asked yesterday if Lyn Hejinian is currently the most important writer working in English. Maybe.
• I don't know why I never created a Juana Molina tag until today, but search her name in the top box on this blog and on the old blogs for lots more songs.

[ONCE THERE WAS A GOOSE...]

Lyn Hejinian

     Once there was a goose who floated midstream from the moment she woke to the moment she slept.

     Once there was a girl who knocked a spider into a river and was thus compelled to put a leaf between her teeth and swim far out into the current holding her head above the stream to rescue it.

     Once there was a family gathered in a small backyard and once there was a turtle on a log and when the family and the turtle are mentioned one after the other the turtle flops off its log and the members of the family laugh.

     Each such episode suggests a moment in an imaginable universe - or, rather, each fills an imaginable and not (by our standards) unreal universe with its own uniqueness, and each uniqueness has staying power.

     Once there was a branch that fell into a stream and the new patterns that swirled around it spelled a name that drifted downstream and disappeared around a bend and no one spoke it nor knew whose it was.

     Once there was a detective on a bridge who longed to tell everyone everything he knew and therefore he started running across the bridge as fast as he could.