I am halfway through J.G.Ballard's High Rise. Friends have urged me to try Ballard, this novel in particular, I'm told it's the best way in. Although I have yet to make the required choice between Team I Love Him and Team I Hate Him, I understand why he is black licorice to so many. Tell me - does he write this bad on purpose? Are paragraphs of seemingly unrelated sentences bad British on purpose? The smack me with the obvious - the building has upper, middle, and lower sections, get it? The lower class' main character is named Wilder, the upper class' main character is named Royal, get it? - on purpose? Cause I can understand if it's deliberate, and would like to think it is - and would credit him for it - though I've a feeling it isn't.
I may just choose not to pick a team. Revolution, yo.
spirit animal
Beth Bachmann
three times the snake appeared before me & like a gun said follow
when you hear fire keep your body close to the ground the snake said
point blank I am here for your protection I don’t have a trigger but I
have a tongue to your neck to your ear to your temple follow me down the
barrel three shots to steady ready the gray-eyed snake spit warming
its body along the crack you can’t go back from where you are unarmed
handle the snake the way you handle a gun at your belt with a glove
spirit guide the gun away from the body follow each bone as it moves up
& down the back
Iannis Xenakis was born ninety-three years ago today. Play LOUD! please for best effect.
The Egoslavian birthdayiest month of the year continues. Will continue. There's one last May birthday, an apt Egoslavian High Holy Day day after tomorrow for finishing.
FIFA Wednesday, Hastert yesterday, I'm so nuts my first thought is Triskelion Co. is purging looming right-tainted turd-droppings pre-2016. My second thought was, depends who's indicted Friday.
Oh, for the record, on third and fourth thought, my Clinton Theory of why an Oligarch's Decision to Try FIFA for the Crimes of The Oligarchs: Bill Clinton (and his overlords and client subordinates) built a ponzi on US getting 2022 and when it was bribed out from beneath him he called down his vengeance.
The right sort of politics - 19th C American anarchism. I'm always willing to listen if always unable to be convinced, not to the argument but to its impossibility.
Purple Line. Here's how small I am: beyond the economic benefits and transportation benefits of the Purple Line, I want it built just to fuck with motherfucking Chevy Chase.
An article on Pere Ubu circa 1977. (h/t Prunella).
The Summer Schedule for WFMU has been released. Looks like Station Manager Ken has moved to a three schedules a year from two. I confess, I'm ridiculously fascinated by what I imagine to be the backroom treachery amongst DJs to save or grab a spot.
A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard, where they have rollcall.
My name begins with an A,
so is one of the first to be read off.
I am wondering where to stand - could that group of three
or four others be the beginning of the line?
Before I have a chance to find out, a rodent-like
man pushes at my shoulders. "It's that way," he hisses.
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? That a photograph
of anything can be real, or maybe not? The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time."
I know I'll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what's called for, meanwhile.
It's true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren't it. This glove hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.
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.
So, yellow and/or white ink from the printer won't show on the photocopy of Stanley's eye, photo taken last night. So, next two bullets are in fact in yellow ink beneath the silver sharpie in the above.
I directly addressed on twooter a twooter/blooger overlord yesterday and was justly ignored despite the quality of the joke, forgive my arrogance, I forgot to maintain an awed and respectful silence before his twooter/bloogerness.
I heard from an old boss yesterday, He''ll be in DC in June, we'll go to a Nats game and drink beer. I asked him if he was still a shaker in DNC as he once was, he emailed back, pfff, fuck that.
Hey, did some blogroll maintenance, moved some moribund to Moribund so if they unzombie I'll see. I think I only moved folk who aren't digibuds, but if you aren't where you were, you're now down in Moribund. Moribund is now the most populated blogroll on the shitty blog. Fine metaphors abound.
I can't find a way to link directly to this post, so next time flowerville posts this link will go to main page not current post, but go read the current post.
Big Blood is my new obsession, the best since the last until the next, love their covers (Cure, for instance) and their own songs.
LET US CONSIDER
Russell Edson
Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....
Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....
Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora....
I was reacting to the reactions to Hillary Inevitability's official announcement of her POTUS 16 candidacy than to her candidacy itself. See post title, for instance. Still, this is not untrue - I agree with it. And this is true: I can't avert my eyes from the spectacle. It's like watching the same Star Trek episode for the 1097th time. I know the script - the batshit right gets batshittier, clears vast terrains on the right on the economic and imperial issues that concern our Triskelions for Clinton to occupy while Clinton goes progressive on divisive social issues to cover her left flank (and drive the batshit right batshittier), and motherfucking professional Democrats and motherfucking devout amateur Democrats will ruthlessly suppress dissent from the Left on the economic and imperial issues that concern our Triskelions. Yes, this does eliminate if not reverse the Who Is -.06% Less Shitty polarity: I could argue that those that play at less shitty to become more shitty ARE the shittinest. Yawn. Still, I can't avert my eyes. I was endoctinated that damnlessness towards American political process is a sin. I am still working on the concept that giving a damn does not require monitoring the sillyass TV show called POTUS or mandatory fandom for either the Red Sox or the Yankees. I have been relatively good, by my standards, of keeping POTUS 16 off this shitty blog, and I will try to limit here (though, from a bleggal economic and imperialistic perspective, yapping about POTUS 16 draws twice as many eyes as most posts, four times as many as slideshows of six mile hikes with Earthgirl). But POTUS 16's shittiness - it is going to be spectacular.
Also too, RIP Peter Culley, whose poetry I did not know until I read this Lisa Robertson review almost two years ago and which I still do not know as well as I should.
A LETTER TO HAMMERTOWN
Peter Culley
1.
The orange chestnut canopy has shredded
into a discarded hamper
of wet umber, umber-orange,
lacy amber, blood-orange
& bloody amber rags
through which tires carve calm channels in time,
neat stripes of a general widening
as the averages catch up.
I snobbishly note on Shasta’s behalf
the oddly spindly thighs
of her underemployed big city sisters
short-leashed
by fedora dad or leopard mom
insulting white bags
threaded through their collars
a badge of slavery–
no sniff, no FIELD, no flicker.
On the soundwalk the light
is louder than I remember,
darkest in the undertree gloom
dramatic gravel bony underfoot
until cranked across by cable car,
eighties rain filtering
through a carpentered forties porch
onto the basement suite stairwell.
Twin ghosts of my brother
pass each other at different times
& don’t look up.
wary, preoccupied, in transit.
Later I made a loop
of the pebble crunch & engine
so that they’d course
through her headphones
& make a kind of disco
that I could then loop again
& install in a top branch
under the streetlight
a kind of permanent radio.
Missing though: the persistent
sense of misdirection, the relaxation
of muscles associated
with certain vocabularies,
the slow rounding off
of matter under successive waves
of daylight & water.
The next day the microphone
was a hummingbird
extracting sugar from ink,
hovering locked sentences
breaking up in a
riot of orange lichen
& red bricks flattened under solar flares.
2.
I abandon my self
to a blushing
of precise boundaries,
like where a squirrel would
step up to snap the branch
back fast enough
to ride the torque all the way back,
a walnut under each arm–
getaway with intent to spring
rather than English leave.
It’s why I wear my
shirts backwards
& my jacket is the color
of the sky.
I’d abandon everything
for a plush spring
with a fat calendar,
every day ringing a bell
every day floating
in a penumbra of sound
echolocalic lenses unfurling
coiled batwings unflapping
as I velociraptor
among rainy streets & thread
on a knotted length of fishing line
pinpricks of orange brick
mixed with holiday sweat.
You abandon yourself
to the runnels & channels
of a new boundary,
ankle deep sliding
thick transparency mirroring
even when disrupted
the thick marine light
located by inference
the waggle of a last leaf &
two minutes of leaping edit
is a spray of divided attention,
your lupine shoulder dropping
hot science on cold water.
3.
The truckers eat on the roof
& the roofers eat in their trucks
tossing wax paper
out the window
until a cleansing thermal draft
sweeps the top of a cherry-picker,
a microbranded
cyclist smoking a Drum Blunt
squishes in half-sleep his thigh
pyjama dancing headset tuned
to the sound of a fan
or a tiny big band
but never opens his eyes not once–
an infant navigator
in a chrome helmet
racing the wax paper.
At the highest branch
of the chestnut an FM transceiver
relays sounds from the street
to another in an alder
on the shores of Beck Lake;
the chestnut is only discernible from the attic
on very quiet nights during frog
season or during storms
but the one on Beck Lake carries traffic
sounds at all times over the reeds,
only fading at the forest canopy.
4.
& in sleep
the furious forest
reconstitutes itself
the ringing silence
thick fleshly endrenched
footfall & Shasta’s fast footfall
lakeside endorsement
underalder endorsement
ringing antennae of sleep
along the long hillsides
always stumbling & climbing
gravity heavy feet prescient sleep
sleep coming to each limb
separately heaving
the will forward fall asleep
walk & fall asleep
along the long lakesides.
Run & drift awake
the stubble of vocabulary
swirls around your feet
in spouts of antique bliss
the furious forest
now suffused with a pink x-ray light
under which the bones
of the street are revealed in
arched & baroque forms
ringing byzantine brass
through coloratura speakers
interrupts the operations of sleep
along the long avenues
always always climbing
the will forward will fall asleep
& run & drift awake
along the long lakesides.
5.
Doesn’t everyone need a stapler
to bind with fallen leaves
their lists of unassailable demands?
A scotchtape splice
to return dead voices
to the brink of audibility?
A stubborn hippie structure
a bottom heavy grid
a moving sidewalk portrait?
On the second soundwalk
the streetcorners bulged
with cartoon furniture
& clouds of silent winter gnats
swirled around the ducts & fans
I’d closed my eyes against
the expected unexpected birds
who kicked the waterjug downwind
stuck firecrackers in the gravel
held electric toothbrushes
against lampposts
the expected unexpected
tricolor of bad country fireworks
strobing raccoon morse code
through the left-open gate.
Better though to lay down on the curb
ears pressed hard against it
like GC used to
to catch those long lonely city tones,
through the headlamp glow
instructions were just
ghosts in purple offices anyhow.
Klondike? Do you hear what he called me? Aren’t you going to fight him? Put together drunk, grinning
at her favorite brown thing who’s mock desperately dialing a cab
on the unmanned cash machine
her filled in diastema
sinking through cookie
to cold whiteness The other ones are called gaps…
An interval then diastem as you step through
this rip of surface tension
into another world–
& just as my father
carried a pint for his father
home from the pub
covering it with his hands
from the rain
I will carry this bucket
of cinammon schnaps
back from Kingsgate Mall
& not spill a drop.
Baseball week one, first Yankees - Red Sox series, all nineteen games broadcast nationally, Fucking Stones v Insufferable Beatles, two for Tuesday blocks, three for Thursday blocks, but first, here's Credence. Some putz hates acronym POTUS, says a nine-letter acronym better. SHITSMEAR? So Hillary Inevitability Totally Sucks, Motherfucker, Eat a Republican?
We hiked both Saturday and Sunday. Rigorous, no, but we were in the woods, we got some elevation for our lungs and twelve miles for our legs after two months of fucking winter. Next weekend, some serious elevation so we can judge where we are. We are stupid ambitious this year: we want to go places we can only get to with backpacks and a tent. We are not so stupid as to go in blind, buying equipment, doing it wrong, wasting money, ruining the experience with inexcusable incompetence - it's been 30 years since I backpacked regularly. We've enrolled in a PATC backpacking class, three classes including an overnight in Shenandoah. Expect me to volunteer for one day a month volunteer trail work. Expect me to make this my new devotion, expect me to yodel about my new true love like I've yodeled for all my ex-loves. I am for me, Ulrich of Voll, I give myself to this year's remake/remodel as proof I can still fervently believe in nothing because I always need to believe in something.
The frogs - or are they toads? Thunder, are you still here? might you know what these are? - from yesterday. On the way there was unexpected traffic, I toggled to the local news-radio station for a traffic update, stayed through weather. It was the top of the hour so right after the weather the main announcer came on to tease upcoming stories. And Ted Cruz will announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination tomorrow in Virginia, said the professional voice. Who's Ted Cruz, asked Earthgirl. Some fuck, I said. They're all fucks, Earthgirl said. We hiked for three hours, it never came up again.
We did - Earthgirl can vouch - run into this guy on the trail yesterday:
Yes, as soon as I saw him I knew today's poem would be the below James Tate.
Ted Cruz: Triskelions trolling you from the Right.
Voting for Hillary matters if you care about who the next SCOTUS appointees are. It matters a lot.
It's the first plea to SCOTUS extortion in Hillary's name for POTUS 16 I've seen. Expect more. Lots more. Saturation more. It was used in support of Obama during POTUS 08 and POTUS 12. Obama has yet the chance to nominate a justice except like for like, he hasn't the chance at a swing vote yet. During POTUS 12, early on, I wished for John Roberts to be hit by a bus early summer 2012 to force Obama to nominate Roberts' replacement and name a new Chief Justice at the height of Obama's reelection campaign - to challenge the assertion that the crucial reason for supporting Obama is and was SCOTUS. Because it still can be: please Baal, any time between now and November 2016 but please please please Baal, in March 2016, when Hillary Inevitability is the nominee, may John Roberts be hit by a bus so this hypothesis be tested once and for all.
For the record, I would be delighted to be wrong re: the person I think Obama/Hillary/professional Democrats would nominate, but I bet pints the nominee would be adamantly pro-Triskelion.
Ishiguro's new novel is fantasy set in medieval England? For the reader, though, the language and the appearance of the kinds of
creature more usually associated with the fantasy genre is something of a
shock. Ishiguro is moderately sympathetic, although to him, of course,
it makes perfect sense. “I often don’t appreciate the extent to which it
might be a surprise,” he concedes. “I’ve come at it from the inside.
What you see at the end is my arrival point. I’ve got there with what to
me are fairly logical steps, but if you encounter it cold you think,
‘God, this is odd.’ This is quite a departure.” I'm game.
Ishiguro's new novel: Mr. Ishiguro still seems slightly anxious about how the book will be
received. It could be embraced as brilliant and groundbreaking, or it
could be a spectacular flop if readers balk at his full-on excursion
into fantasy... “As
a longtime Ishiguro reader, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected, and I
got it,” Lev Grossman, the fantasy novelist and book critic, said of
“The Buried Giant.” “A misty Arthurian epic is just about the last thing
I would have seen coming.” Some
fans view “The Buried Giant” as a leap not just for Mr. Ishiguro, but
also for fantasy literature as a whole. David Mitchell, author of “Cloud
Atlas,” said in an email that if he was “forced at knife point” to name
his favorite Ishiguro novel, he would choose “The Buried Giant” for the
way it uses fantasy tropes to explore questions about love and
mortality. I'm game.
Yes, it's about contemporary New Zealand politics (of which I am, in terms of players on which team if not at the two teams, resoundingly ignorant), but Culture of Amnesia in politics works everywhere.
I have in my hand a list. I know people on that list; a couple are friends. I talked with one yesterday; the campus newspaper contacted her for an interview, it's a lose/lose for her.
Martin O'Malley is not running for POTUS 16 (even if he runs in POTUS 16), Martin O'Malley is running for POTUS 24 (or promotion should President Hillary Inevitability die in office after naming O'Malley VPOTUS, which is what he is running for in 2016).
Digitizing John Ashbery. Two or three years ago I needed to find my Collected Jack Gilbert and couldn't find - and haven't found, if you have it give it back - for a poem that had a line I needed for a particular post's title (see, that's how it works - I know you don't care - maybe half the time: a quarter of the time I know I want a particular poet but not a particular poem, an eighth of the time it's a particular word that leads to a discovered poem in a poetry archive, a sixteenth of the time I discovered the poem I was seeking either wasn't as rewarding in rereading as I remembered but another poem by the same poet I didn't appreciate before wows me over, and from here the point is made and the digressions are infinite...). So I bought the Gilbert online, it's on my iPad's Kindle, it reads fine, though Gilbert's lines don't break and skip and indent and blank in ways that make kindlazation of some poets' poems problematic.
Today's post's title, for instance, when I read that Peter Gutteridge died I was thinking of posting the Overnight Planet Post - she had just sent me photos of the start of her latest art project - then remembered I am not posting the Overnight Planet Post, but since the Overnight Planet Post is anchored to a Richard Wilbur poem and since Peter Gutteridge was a member of The Clean and since Richard Wilbur's poem - probably his most known - Love Calls Us to the Things of the World has the line "Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves...."
If you type The Clean into this shitty blog's search box you can pull up a bunch more songs.
Let me just say this about that: if Rand Paul wins POTUS 16 - and for the record I don't think Rand Paul will win POTUS 16, I don't think he will be permitted to win the GOP nomination for POTUS 16 - remember Ferguson 14, when Paul spoke out against the militarization of police and spoke forthrightly about the state of racial inequalities of legal justice in America while the current POTUS, a motherfucker, took five minutes to step off the Fifth Tee and his round of golf with rich Democratic fundraisers to offer mumbly centrist bullshit of nothingness. Does it matter if each was equally cynical?
We had dinner last night with my brother-in-law's family. His wife's son is a twenty year old rising junior at V____. Talk, as it inevitably does, turned to politics, to Ferguson. The kid - he's fine, this is not knock - sounded like I must have at twenty. The context may have been different, but the assuredness of opinion expressed in his considered worldly experience, the passion of his convinced philosophy, reminded me of me at twenty. Me at fifty-five.
I can't find my copy - I think I lent it to someone with whom I've lost contact, of April Galleons (the book Snowball in Hell comes from) and I can't find the poem online and while I have access to a university library's stacks I don't have access right this minute. I'll get you the poem soon. Let's be honest: I'll get me the poem soon. You don't care.
