The Walls of Jeff’s Villa Resonate With the Intermittent, Migraine-Like Drone of Motorized Gondolas and the Distant Murmur of Cats

Flem Snopes just married the pregnant-but-not-with-his-kid Eula Varner, the fuck am I doing in Yoknapatawpha County at the turn of the 20th century? I'd forgotten Faulkner can be laugh-out-loud funny. When I'm not there I'm in Acadian Canada in the mid-seventeenth century witnessing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of indigenous North Americans (though, in a typical if vital Vollmann digression, I just spent 50 pages with Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola in sixteenth century Spain before his beatification), the fuck am I doing there? and when I'm not there I'm in David Ohle's Pisstown, I know what I'm doing here. I'm grateful that I'm reading and reading well: I've failed a dozen novels, old and new, first reads and rereads, in the past six months, I blame me





Strangest days of my life. Reflexive tick: when my daughter is my age it will be 2059, the Earth will be here but will the world? The Faulkner, Vollmann, Ohle novels, the lust for power by assholes is a major theme, it occurs to me that humans would have destroyed the world already if they only had the means, and now that they have the means and the end seems unstoppably inevitable I don't want to read fiction about assholes set in today. Why this is reassuring to me - that humans are no worse than ever they just have the means to enact greater and greater assholosity - is, at best, a coping mechanism that offsets my compulsive documentation of said current assholosity. Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop our immiseration and extinction is evaporating exponentially faster by the second. How 'bout that hockey game, huh?





I actually wanted to bump the George birthday post from the top, fuck me. Music too, sounds I once loved unto never conceiving I'd not only not mind not hearing them for a very long time if not ever fucking again are increasing with clusterfuck's swelling and deepening. I listened to *All Things Must Pass* past Tuesday after posting the birthday, at first I vibrated like always but by "Wah Wah," gone; was horrified but unsurprised. I won't truly worry about my head until hiking with L and playing disc golf suck and being finally incapable of reading anything or listening to anything (I've long since stopped watching anything), but my head is changing, not all for the bad but most, and it's not just aging towards my skeleton days. Yes, I changed the name in the title of this post from the line in the Ashbery poem the title comes from. Ashbery still works for me





Éliane Radigue died this week. If you look at my bandcamp page you'd see some of her music and many artists I would not be listening to now if I hadn't discovered Radigue decades ago. My current immersion (to L's annoyance when she's in my car) in ambience and drone and noise directly related to Radigue's seminal music. I've been listening constantly since news of her death. Radigue's music still makes me vibrate and vibrate more resonantly than ever, I'm (almost more relieved than) delighted to report. Need some of the toeholds to my past, yinz

Western Elites Are Making A Play For Eternal Oligarchy
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
⮩	Too few people are freaking the fuck out, and whatever miniscule chance there is to stop this is evaporating exponentially faster by the second
"Every fascism has its suhumans. To technofascists, humans are the subhumans"				The Government Just Made it Harder to See What Spy Tech it Buys
Elite psychopathy, mutual blackmail, and the bleeding edge of power
Shoddy People: The redemption of disgrace
On the Motherfucking Democratic Party Style
DCCC Rakes in Millions From Palantir Lobbyists as Protests Target the Company’s ICE Surveillance Tools
"Under pressure, a Dem rep said she would refuse AIPAC money. So instead Hakeem Jeffries is secretly funneling AIPAC money into her race through a shadow super PAC"
Democratic Party elites *WANT* war with Iran
"Again, just a perfect example of Blue MAGA team-sport denialism. Feigned ignorance as a political policy. The "average Biden scandal" was funding a genocide he lied about knowing the severity of while his staff actively hid his obvious mental and cognitive decline for two entire years"
Shittiness		The good rich man?				Shittiness
Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves
The culture war is coming for your electricity
Avedon Carol			Preparation for a lynching
"right wing pastors are screaming, crying, throwing up because John Piper posted a Bible verse on the everything app"
Will Your State Bird Disappear?		Crackers banning books		Depraved face of capitalism		AI On The Pentagon’s Precipice
"In the past 24hrs the WaPo has run pieces arguing for (1) expanding NATO (2) regime change in Cuba (3) regime change in Iran (4) opposition to a ban on congressional stock trading (5) cutting “red tape” to expand AI energy capacity (6) getting rid of social security altogether"
Self-portrait with four legs and a dagger
Rest in Peace, Eliane Radigue
Fabio played three sets of Radigue yesterday

HISTOIRE UNIVERSELLE

John Ashbery

As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 AM it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss is being made; it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.

The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.

We Have Grown Nonchalant Towards the Other World

Yes, Saturdays I often post music I heard on Bryce's Friday show, but - and this is true, only I can vouch, you believe or don't - I fell asleep listening to Radigue Thursday night - not this piece, but this






and this





and this




  
and this -





 
and promised myself Radigue here on Saturday before Bryce played Transamorem Transmortem yesterday. Blessed be Serendipity, fucked be the days when Radigue occurs to two people seeking - I project like I always do, should only speak for me - balm and calm and resolve.

• Balm and calm? Me? As for resolve, sure, but to what end?
• Tom's heartbreaking pieces on Gaza continue, Hijos de un dios menor and When Medics Cry.
• Pretexts.
• The thing is, when Israel says it is showing "unimaginable restraint" it might be a true statement, so think what it wishes it could do.
• Forced to: Since 1948 Israel has refused to deal with the refugee question: the very existence of UNRWA schools and camps in Gaza is a direct result. It is Israel, not Hamas, that is occupying the West Bank and building illegal settlements (more than 120 to date). Since Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the occupation has been replaced by a sort of internment: Gaza is like a large prison, or a sprawling conurbation under siege. Despite the falsehoods of Israeli demagogues it isn’t Hamas that has laid siege to Gaza since 2007, it is Israel. Most world leaders have acknowledged it: in 2010 even Cameron said that the ‘Israeli blockade has turned the Gaza Strip into a prison camp.’ Was Israel ‘forced’ to quarantine Gaza? On the contrary it took the decision to do so, having calculated that by tightening the screws on 1.8 million people already living under the harshest conditions in the most densely populated place on earth, it would ensure peace and stability for Israelis. Strangely things haven’t gone to plan and once again Israel is ‘forced’ to kill civilians and children while hiding the truth from itself that its policy in Gaza was a choice. In this moment of terrible delusion it is worth repeating the point: Hamas is not laying siege to Gaza or bombing it from the air.
• Syllogism of Death. 
• Powerful and coldhearted. 
• On the above. Empathy varies inversely with power: powerful people should be under continuous suspicion, should be regarded with continuous skepticism. the only real point has to be to hem them in, mitigate their disastrous effects, or tear them down. the human desire to be subordinated just puts us in the hands of the worst among us. that we deserve the exploitation, poverty, and rape that we receive from authorities, however, does not entail that the authorities aren't evil.
• The Executioner's Last Songs. 
• Also too, about a month ago I found a collected Merrill in a used book store, said what the hell. after all these year's of Merrill blindness I can see. Sweet.

 





VOICES FROM THE OTHER WORLD

James Merrill

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,   

Then circled lazily about

From A to Z. The first voice heard

(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)   

Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.

Dead in his 22nd year

Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN

NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.   

Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde   

Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,   

Some childish and, you might say, blurred   

By sleep; one little boy

Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled   

Back the arras for that next voice,   

Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.

FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.   

OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed

Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.

Each night since then, the moon waxes,   

Small insects flit round a cold torch

We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,

Dictate addresses, begging us to write;

Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom   

In ways that so exhilarate

We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.   

Indeed, we have grown nonchalant

Towards the other world. In the gloom here,   

our elbows on the cleared

Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone

Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,   

Than by those clamoring overhead,

Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment

We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit

By the cold reflections of the dead

Risen extinct but irresistible,

Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,   

Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

Sam Thought Glass and Light Signals Might Work

• Earthgirl went to the doctor yesterday who gasped at Earthgirl's leg - which hurts more eight days after the fall than any day since the fall - and demanded Earthgirl see an orthopedic today. Concern has turned to worry.
• UPDATE! It's gonna be black and blue and purple and hurt like a motherfucker for a month or two but Earthgirl's leg will be fine. The relief in her voice is wonderful.
• UPDATE! For content, the general practitioner yesterday talked of (a) blood infection (b) compartmentalized blood pooling (c) hidden broken bones and (d) possible surgery.
• UPDATE! For those of you following Earthgirl's knees, do you realize it's been sixteen years since my clock sputtered? Annual today: I'm "ridiculously healthy", says clockmaker! 
• UPDATE! If I don't hike this coming weekend my head is going to explode.
• Homeless spikes. America 2014.
• There's another new shitstorm (more here) (h/t) in Left Blegsylvania. (I recommend reading the comments at the second De Boer post and at Tarzie's post.) There is always a new shitstorm in Left Blegsylvania. I can't keep up.
• A reminder to please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur.
• Badiou and Beckett, for those of you who one or the other or both.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Silliman's always generous litlinks.
• Damn, I'm 6th again.
• Order out of chaos.
• Cozy Restaurant closes. I hadn't eaten there in decades - since I was a kid, probably - but Cozy was a landmark on 15.
• King Crimson is reforming. Touring. Closest they come to DC is Philly. I'd have had a debate with myself if they had a show nearby, I don't even need talk myself out of driving to Philly.
• You'll see why I couldn't type out today's poem. Click, yo, to enlarge.

LIT

Robert Fitterman

The Gumming Snarl of Some Grouchy Dog Sounds

Putting the poor before the profits and bling. Every Chavez obit in the Western press. Defaming Chavez. The British press on Chavez. Foucault's plague. Consider Phlebas, would have posted to read even without unintended allusion to Fleabus, photo above. OK, so drones. The debate is a red herring, can we bitch about drones and their potential surveillance use rather than their potential as snuff weapons? Here's the question Eric Holder needs to be asked: Can POTUS order a human - American citizen or not - snuffed? Can his assassination coordinator call Obama and say, how about we push Johnson in front of a Red Line Metro, and Obama can say, Sure, and shrug his shoulders wearily but .06% more nobly (in the opinion of loyal Democrats) than Romney would have wearily shrugged his shoulders? Not that we don't know the answer. John Yoo defends Barack Obama. Who are the children? What is to be done with the actually existing Marxist left? What should radical political operation look like? The role of urban social movements. Operation Condor and propaganda organs. Oh, no, there was no Thursday Night Pints last night; it's Spring Break at Illhoptay, two of four are away, one is still recovering from illness, I don't drink by myself. Paul Bearer is dead.





Are cats fooled by optical illusions? Snow is falling on the Age of Creative Writing. Illustrating Gravity's Rainbow. Christine Brooke-Rose, for those of you who do. I confess, I've meant to, just haven't. Suggest a good place to start? Coetzee, for those of you who do. Milton, for those of you who do. Carruth, for those of you who do. Murakami, for those of you who do. Russ, for those of you who do. Hey, we're house-cleaning, found my second copy of James Wright's collected, anyone want? (UPDATE! Hamster has claimed the James Wright, plus reminds me that Alan Hovhaness was born 102 years ago today: here's his Spirit of the Trees.) A short film about an accident about to happen. Stream a new video from The Knife? Radulescu. Six hours of Radigue. Thirty years of Blue Monday. Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, get your John Cale requests in, or not. Another great playlist from Prunella. Four minutes of power pop?





A WINTER DAYBREAK ABOVE VENCE

James Wright

The night’s drifts

Pile up below me and behind my back,

Slide down the hill, rise again, and build

Eerie little dunes on the roof of the house.   

In the valley below me,

Miles between me and the town of St.-Jeannet,   

The road lamps glow.

They are so cold, they might as well be dark.   

Trucks and cars

Cough and drone down there between the golden   

Coffins of greenhouses, the startled squawk   

Of a rooster claws heavily across

A grove, and drowns.

The gumming snarl of some grouchy dog sounds,   

And a man bitterly shifts his broken gears.   

True night still hangs on,

Mist cluttered with a racket of its own.

Now on the mountainside,

A little way downhill among turning rocks,

A square takes form in the side of a dim wall.   

I hear a bucket rattle or something, tinny,   

No other stirring behind the dim face

Of the goatherd’s house. I imagine

His goats are still sleeping, dreaming

Of the fresh roses

Beyond the walls of the greenhouse below them   

And of lettuce leaves opening in Tunisia.

I turn, and somehow

Impossibly hovering in the air over everything,

The Mediterranean, nearer to the moon

Than this mountain is,   

Shines. A voice clearly

Tells me to snap out of it. Galway

Mutters out of the house and up the stone stairs

To start the motor. The moon and the stars

Suddenly flicker out, and the whole mountain   

Appears, pale as a shell.

Look, the sea has not fallen and broken   

Our heads. How can I feel so warm   

Here in the dead center of January? I can   

Scarcely believe it, and yet I have to, this is   

The only life I have. I get up from the stone.   

My body mumbles something unseemly

And follows me. Now we are all sitting here strangely   

On top of the sunlight.

Keeping a Kind of Thieves' Kitchen for the Things Sequestered from the World

         
I read a post on Dangerous Minds, I said at Thursday Night Pints, it mocked Palin for saying something Palin stupid and then mocked Mark Levin (who I've never heard of, he's a rightwing radio host apparently) for saying (I told K and L, see you next week, hopefully, D, that I was going to quote directly from post): Law enforcement and national security agencies — they play out multiple scenarios. They simulate multiple scenarios. I’ll tell you what I think they’re simulating: the collapse of our financial system, the collapse of our society and the potential for widespread violence, looting, killing in the streets, because that’s what happens when an economy collapses. I love Dangerous Minds, I said, they provided a Peter Gabriel video I'll use as part of this gag, but who doesn't think, I asked K and L, that law enforcement and national security agencies are planning multiple scenarios in event of the inevitable collapse of our financial system, a system built on value that doesn't exist? Ironic, said L, Bradley Manning's trial starting the same day as your brother's birthday. I said,                                                                                                   .                 ,                                            . K said                                              and Aaron Swartz too. L said,                                                                ,                                   :                         . I said, there was never a chance Obama wouldn't win reelection. L said, the Obama Austerity Offensive... hey is that a fly or a mini-drone, waving a hands at what I think was fly but can't be sure over her needed to be refilled tumbler of ridiculously priced amber Nyquil.





Eliane Radigue is now the House Band of this shitty blog. Played lots here before, been a couple of months, holyfuck. Fabio played two Radigue pieces yesterday, hear them there, lots here as I find it, including rebroadcasts, my faith is indulged. Today is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. I can't improve on yesterday's post for today's celebration other than noting Nemerov was born on February 29, 1920, so I can only defer to March 1 three out of four years, and at that I respect Lowell, born 96 years ago today and admire and respect and love like an uncle Richard Wilbur, born 92 years ago today, and that if reading Nemerov, born 93 years ago today, reminds me more of the bridge he was to how I read today than of the poetry itself, I am blessed. In praise of minor writers. Joan Didion reads Bob Woodward. Motherfucking Obama: President Obama and a host of administration spokespersons have condemned the Sequestration, explaining how it will cause catastrophic damage to hundreds of vital government services. Those of us who teach economics, however, always stress “revealed preferences” – it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what you do that matters. Obama has revealed his preference by refusing to sponsor, or even support, a clean bill that would kill the sequestration threat to our Nation. Instead, he has nominated Jacob Lew, the author of the Sequestration provision, as his principal economic advisor. Lew is one of the strongest proponents of austerity and what he and Obama call the “Grand Bargain” – which would inflict large cuts in social programs and the safety net and some increases in revenues. Obama has made clear that he hopes this Grand Betrayal (my phrase) will be his legacy. Obama and Lew do not want to remove the Sequester because they view it as creating the leverage – over progressives – essential to induce them to vote for the Grand Betrayal. Just to reiterate the duh. Here's how cynical I am - it's not an accident Obama chose yesterday to do this, fellow rubes. Snark redux. We aren't the world. Offered for consideration, since the subject is out there amongst friends: Prayer of the Anarch. God's resignation letter. Choreographic, chiropractic. Capitalism and inequality. Is Brave New World actually here? Kristol Shrew Persuasion. Late afternoon of the academic elite. Re: the financial crisis at Illtophay - I said,                                            . I agree, said K, but
                                 .  L said,                                                             , so fuck them all. Maggie's boatload of links. Melville, for those of you who do, or don't but should. Nocturnal resolutions. Knausgaard, for those of you who do. I hate the conceit of the novel, on multiple levels, forgive me, better bleggalgazing than novel-naveling, the first is poorer but honester. Josipovici, for those of you who do. Because you asked about the line between poetry and prose. Prunella's latest playlist. No, I said when K asked, no one will comment on yesterday's Nemerov/Wilbur/Lowell post, only a dozen will read the poems. I'll kill comments when I wake up Friday morning.





POCKETS

Howard Nemerov

Are generally over or around
Erogenous zones, they seem to dive
In the direction of those

Dark places, and indeed
It is their nature to be dark
Themselves, keeping a kind

Of thieves' kitchen for the things
Sequestered from the world
For long of little while,

The keys, the handkerchiefs,
The said and vagrant little coins
That are really only passing through.

For all the locate closest to lust,
No pocket ever sees another;
There is in fact a certain sadness

To pockets, going in their lonesome ways
And snuffling up their sifting storms
Of dust, tobacco bits and lint.

A pocket with a hole in it
Drops out; from shame, is that, or pride?
What is a pocket but a hole?