I Lived Between Between a Laugh and a Scowl and Voted Against Myself

These the last two paintings you will see here or the other place until the week after Easter at the very earliest, yay for you!

Driving to Michigan April Fools Day for a week with our daughter and son-in-law. Packed no paint, no canvases, I can’t paint on vacations, no time, no privacy, no urge, no point worrying what to bring, what not, to not paint

If I take no paint and canvases to Michigan and want to paint I can blame me for not taking paint and canvases to Michigan, deem this a failed experiment, then pack them for Maine this July where I'll end up annoyed with me not painting when I packed paint and canvases

I have no plans beyond hiking with L and discing everyday (this Sunday my daughter (C) and my son-in-law (I) and I's bestfriend join me for their first disc experience) while L paints then dinner and games and laughs with C&I on our backporch watching the sunset. I have no plans to post or not post, link-fish or not link-fish, whisper or not whisper, bark or not bark. I have no plans to bleggalgaze or not, debate or not the future of this shitty blog and/or the other shitty blog. I hope to tablet but won't if don't, read but won't if don't. I will toke, enjoy Michigan beer after dinner sitting on the backporch watching the sunset and laughing with and C&I. What blog I'll (me) see. Have I (me) told you there is a new Swans ablum coming and they're released a new song? It's true. I (me) plan to be happy

I will be listening to Richard Dawson, LOTS! Lots. Lots lots lots

I will be listening to Richard Youngs, LOTS! Lots. Lots lots lots

I will be listening to Jenny Hval LOTS! Lots. Lots lots lots





SELF-PORTRAIT

Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,

like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift

and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,

and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,

my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,

my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ

donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades

of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow

while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,

but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand

will be clasped over my chest in the coffin 

and I'll be reconciled at last,

I'll be whole again.

I'd Like to Have a Silver Hat Please

• A colleague gave birth earlier this week and the baby died hours later and the news broke my fugue, sounds horrible, is true
• Earthgirl knit a hat in non-gendered colors, bright red with orange ears, for Colleague's new baby since my Colleague and spouse chose (as should you) not to know, two nights ago I texted a photo of the hat to my Colleague not knowing the baby had already died
• She texted back condolences for my new urns but did not mention her born child that died
• Also true: Earthgirl knit a hat for Richard and Aimee's child, the hat orange with bright red ears, years ago
• Richard sent photo of baby in orange hat at angle that obscured the red ears
• Earthgirl, shown photo, like, where are the red ears
• Richard, friend and good guy, sent funny barb back (more than once), photo proving he had not in fact de-eared the hat Earthgirl knit for his child
• I sent photo of hat Earthgirl knit for Colleague's baby to Colleague, hat rolled up and set on a PC left speaker like the hats my Colleague wears and also too what me and Colleague talk about other than work, music
• Colleague thanked me and asked me to thank Earthgirl after Colleague's just born child had died but I didn't know, I showed photo and thank you to Earthgirl, why did I roll the hat up, she asked
• Anyway
• Richard emailed me last night out of the blue, first time in months, a year
• Serendipity
• holyfuck
• broke my fugue

 


 

• Why do we get sad when robots die?
• Civilization v Barbarism
• A new Middle East?
• Motherfucking Christers
• Trump's collaborators
• Motherfucking crackers
• History of American nazi-punching 
• Motherfucking Democrats
• Motherfucking NPR
• I saw and heard a clip of Trump's new Crazy Bernie farts, I am telling you three times internal polling at both the Yankees and Red Sox front offices more pro-Bernie than anyone willing to say out loud
• Avedon Carol's occasional links 
• There have always been gangs in poetry
• I purposely do not have a tag *Serendipity* because jinx
• Poets in the age of surveillance
• I never minded when someone (most likely Elric) put on Rush but never put on Rush myself, but RIP Neil Peart 
• I need type the words *Richard Youngs* here and add the tag *Richard Youngs* to the post's tags since searching *Richard Youngs* on blog brings up none of all the songs I've posted

PERSONAL POEM

Frank O'Hara

Now when I walk around at lunchtime

I have only two charms in my pocket

an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me

and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case

when I was in Madrid the others never

brought me too much luck though they did

help keep me in New York against coercion

but now I'm happy for a time and interested

  

I walk through the luminous humidity

passing the House of Seagram with its wet

and its loungers and the construction to

the left that closed the sidewalk if

I ever get to be a construction worker

I'd like to have a silver hat please

and get to Moriarty's where I wait for

LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and

shaker the last five years my batting average

is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in

and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12

times last night outside birdland by a cop

a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible

disease but we don't give her one we

don't like terrible diseases, then

   

we go eat some fish and some ale it's

cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling

we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like

Henry James so much we like Herman Melville

we don't want to be in the poets' walk in

San Francisco even we just want to be rich

and walk on girders in our silver hats

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so

What Is the Person Made of the Second Substance?

• I don't know if yesterday's post was the first with zero content by me, I'm certain it's why I had no choice but post today, fuck me
• If you haven't read the Anne Boyer poem-essay from yesterday I urge it upon you again, best Duh of Our Clusterfuck and the square you sit on I've read
• (and if you didn't read the comment I posted, ask me nice and if I like you I can get you a copy of the book the essay is from)
• Found the fountain pen SeatSix gave me two giftmases ago, I'd put it away when I enacted new tablet and pen rules (it's what I do)
• pen juuls single cartridges for each color ink, suck up honey from inkwells, I'm a klutz self-tattooed
• IHTWTGADTLWLIPTD

• So blue lighthouse, filled more than halfway with nothing but black ink, new rules apply
• speaking of tablets, above photo bigger at other place
• Kill the rich.
• The capitalist takeover of higher education.
• One of many I don't write here my employer (and alma mater), Eorgetown Guniversity, I don't think I violate my rules when I vouch the above link mostly true.
• Meritocracy isn't.
• Motherfucking white men.
• State propaganda will make more noise over Sanders' taxes than Trump's (or Biden's)
• The social novel at the end of society.
• A cat is a black box.
• New Richard Youngs!

AT LEAST TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE

Anne Boyer

There are  at  least two  types of people,  the  first for  whom the  ordinary
worldliness is easy.  The  regular  social routines  and  material  cares  are
nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from
the  creation  and  maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat
them  as  alien. And also, from  them, the efforts  toward the world, and to
them,  the  fulfillment  of the  world's  moderate desires, flow. They are ef-
fortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand,  being
hired, being paid, cleaning up,  spending, playing, mating.  They are in an
ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them.
  
Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the every-
day  world wash  over.  There  is  rarely,  in this  second type, any easy kind
of absorption.  There  is only  a  visible  evidence  of having  been made of a
different  substance,  one that  repels.  Also, from them,  it is almost impos-
sible  to  give  to  the  world  what  it will  welcome or reward. For how does
this  second  type  hold  their arms?  Across their chest? Behind their back?
And  how  do  they  find  food  to eat  and  then prepare this food? And how
do  they  receive  a  check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of
love  or  being loved, its  expansiveness,  the way it is used for markets and
indentured moods?
  
And what is this  second  substance?  And how does it come  to have as one
of  its  qualities  the  resistance of the world  as it is?  And also,  what is  the
person  made  of  the  second  substance?   Is this a  human or more or  less
than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human
whose  arms  do  not  easily  arrange  themselves and for whom the salaries
and  weddings  and  garages do not come?
  
These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The
first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only  to
the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance,
and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.

All Power Is Saved, Having No End

• Landru tweeted out about Prince tribute at Super Bowl. I typed in reply: Not snark. I can't conceive of anyone doing anything that would please anybody. Fine metaphors abound. and did not send.
• You're welcome.
• I do not know if there was a Prince tribute or not nor if there was if anyone was happy with it.
• Helmetball as Fine Metaphor Abounding.
• Taking it to the streets in America!
• Making you more dependent by convincing you you're buying independence is capitalism's best trick.
• Left Nostalgia.
• Daily Everybody Sucks.
• Three colours and a hue.
• What is the last question?
• For instance: Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The significance of the number eight in Blood Meridian.'
• Don DeLillo v Chicken Nuggets w/r/t Pynchonian Errata and Synchronicity. (h/t davidly).
• Rukeyser's Book of the Dead being rereleased!
• I can front you a PDF if you ask nice and I like you.
• Title poem: Book of the Dead.
• Have I mentioned there's new Richard Youngs?

THE DAM

Murial Rukeyser

All power is saved, having no end.     Rises

in the green season, in the sudden season

the white the budded

                                             and the lost.

Water celebrates, yielding continually

sheeted and fast in its overfall

slips down the rock, evades the pillars

building its colonnades, repairs

in stream and standing wave

retains its seaward green

broken by obstacle rock; falling, the water sheet

spouts, and the mind dances, excess of white.

White brilliant function of the land’s disease.

   

Many-spanned, lighted, the crest leans under

concrete arches and the channeled hills,

turns in the gorge toward its release;

kinetic and controlled, the sluice

urging the hollow, the thunder,

the major climax

                                   energy

total and open watercourse

praising the spillway, fiery glaze,

crackle of light, cleanest velocity

flooding, the moulded force.

   

                    I open out a way over the water

                    I form a path between the Combatants:

                    Grant that I sail down like a living bird,

                    power over the fields and Pool of Fire.

                    Phoenix, I sail over the phoenix world.

      

Diverted water, the fern and fuming white

ascend in mist of continuous diffusion.

Rivers are turning inside their mountains,

streams line the stone, rest at the overflow

lake and in lanes of pliant color lie.

Blessing of this innumerable silver,

printed in silver, images of stone

walk on a screen of falling water

in film-silver in continual change

recurring colored, plunging with the wave.

     

Constellations of light, abundance of many rivers.

The sheeted island-cities, the white surf filling west,

the hope, fast water spilled where still pools fed.

Great power flying deep: between the rock and the sunset,

the caretaker’s house and the steep abutment,

hypnotic water fallen and the tunnels under

the moist and fragile galleries of stone,

mile-long, under the wave. Whether snow fall,

the quick light fall, years of white cities fall,

flood that this valley built falls slipping down

the green turn in the river’s green.

Steep gorge, the wedge of crystal in the sky.

     

     How many feet of whirlpools?

     What is a year in terms of falling water?

     Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities.

     Continuity: Σ Q = 0

     Equations for falling water. The streaming motion.

     The balance-sheet of energy that flows

     passing along its infinite barrier.

     

     It breaks the hills, cracking the riches wide,

     runs through electric wires;

     it comes, warning the night,

     running among these rigid hills,

     a single force to waken our eyes.

     

     They poured the concrete and the columns stood,

     laid bare the bedrock, set the cells of steel,

     a dam for monument was what they hammered home.

     Blasted, and stocks went up;

     insured the base,

     and limousines

     wrote their own graphs upon

     roadbed and lifeline.

     

Their hands touched mastery:

wait for defense, solid across the world.

Mr. Griswold. “A corporation is a body without a soul.”

Mr. Dunn. When they were caught at it they resorted to the

     methods employed by gunmen, ordinary machine gun racke-

     teers. They cowardly tried to buy out the people who had the

     information on them.

Mr. Marcantonio. I agree that a racket has been practised, but the

     most damnable racketeering that I have ever known is the

     paying of a fee to the very attorney who represented these

     victims. That is the most outrageous racket that has ever come

     within my knowledge.

Miss Allen. Mr. Jesse J. Ricks, the president of the Union Carbide

     & Carbon Corporation, suggested that the stockholder had

     better take this question up in a private conference.

The dam is safe. A scene of power.

The dam is the father of the tunnel.

This is the valley’s work, the white, the shining.

                                                                                                                                                          

                            Stock and                

                          Dividend in                                                                 Net             Closing        

   High  Low            Dollars                   Open   High   Low    Last   Chge.   Bid    Ask    Sales 

    111   61 ¼  Union Carbide (3.20)...67 ¼   69 ½  67 ¼  69 ½   +3     69 ¼  69 ½ 3 ,400

                                                                                                                                                                 

                         

The dam is used when the tunnel is used.

The men and the water are never idle,

have definitions.

This is a perfect fluid, having no age nor hours,

surviving scarless, unaltered, loving rest,

willing to run forever to find its peace

in equal seas in currents of still glass.

Effects of friction : to fight and pass again,

learning its power, conquering boundaries,

able to rise blind in revolts of tide,

broken and sacrificed to flow resumed.

Collecting eternally power. Spender of power,

torn, never can be killed, speeded in filaments,

million, its power can rest and rise forever,

wait and be flexible. Be born again.

Nothing is lost, even among the wars,

imperfect flow, confusion of force.

It will rise. These are the phases of its face.

It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden.

It changes. It does not die.

Our Flesh Is Not Widely Loved

• I had ordered Youngs Inside the Future last year and then promptly misplaced the CD a day after it arrived, guess what I found last night.
• I'm now in my cycle at the stage when a radio commercial (this one played each half inning on Nationals' baseball radio) becomes an overblown metaphor of everyone and everything pissing me off: Budweiser (says the over-baritoned masculine voiceover). Brewed the hard way, not the easy way. With twelve breweries across the country we're not small, we're large. Budweiser, the famous (baritone drops for emphasis) AMERICAN (enunciate) lager, not backing down since (whatever the fuck year they use), the Dutch-owned fucks.
• I had never seen a Budweiser brewery until Planet went to college in Ohio and we were on the Columbus Beltway, north side, it's a fucking factory.
• Hyperstitional Gazer of Futurity. I kinda agree.
• Starhawking the privilege game.
• Hillary's Courtiers: on Meritocracy.
• Bill Clinton to Millennials: You are everything wrong with this country, vote for Hillary.
• On the ▲ Clintons as cyborgs.
• Survive, resist, endure. Bringing Native Women's Struggle to Life on Stage.
• Also too ▲ Changing the Law One Show at a Time.
• Under the painted staircase.
• The rhetoric of tweeting.
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze re: why I value weekend posts / see post title <<
• On Zeitgeist, postscript. Also too re: 80s by way of Prince.
• This week in water.
• It's Rockville, not Potomac, WaPo assholes.
• The above and below Youngs songs are the only two I could find on youtube, the bottom song from an earlier album.
• More Youngs' songs here.
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze re: fine metaphors abounding as bleggal keystone <<
• Cassandra Canary Weathervane Fool. I had to stop and think about it when I remembered something like that once. (See the last line of the Wright poem below to see what reminded me - hell, the whole poem.) No reunion tour planned.
• >> Deleted bleggalgaze re: fuck me. <<
• Just ordered Shallcross, C.D. Wright's first posthumous book of new poems submitted for pub before her death. I swear I only read about the new book today though I've been reading Wright the past six months (started before she died on me, Fuck 2016): the poem yesterday and one syllables was Wright-inspired. I haven't blossomed an infatuation with anyfuckingthing in I can't remember...
• Ask me nice - if I like you I can turn you on to some Wright.

SELF-PORTRAIT ON A ROCKY MOUNT

C.D. Wright

     I am the goat. Caroline by name. Nee 6, January. Domesticated
since the 6th century before Jesus, a goat himself.

     We have served as a source of meat, leather, milk, and hair.
Our flesh is not widely loved. Yet our younger, under parts
make fine gloves.

     Out of our hair - pretty sweaters, wigs for magistrates. Our
milk is good for cheese.

     We share these gifts with Richard Milhous Nixon, who gained
national prominence for his investigation of Mr Hiss.

     We're no sloth, full-time workers a the minimum wage,
We had an annual income last year of $6,968, a little less than
your average subway musician.

     Our horoscope assures - we will be a great success socially
and in some artistic calling.

     We are sure-footed, esp. on hills. We live on next-to-nothing.
This week's victuals: ironing board covers and swollen paperbacks.
Our small hills of filings fall under the heading of useful by-products.
This we call Industrial Poetry. Both of us being Bearded, Mystic,
Horned.

No One's Bothered to Ask the Bear What He Thinks

• New Richard Youngs. Have I ever mentioned that I love Richard Youngs?
• I understand why Earthgirl won't let me play certain music when she's in the car, but I don't understand why she doesn't like Richard Youngs. 
• The other side of terrorism. To re-yodel for the umpillionth time: terrorism - Triskelions dig it.
• Let me blunt. Anyone who wants our leadership to “fix” terrorism has either not been paying attention, is a fool, or is a tool who knows they’ll make it worse but expects to personally benefit in some way.
• For the record, I work at a very attractive terrorist target in a very obvious target city, and I'm not freaking out, you motherfucking cowards in Backwater America.
• So yes, I wrote about this, I'm as guiltily happy as anyone, trained, fuck me.
• Stevie Smith.
• Yemayas' Belly. 
• Extraneous decoration.
• Turnt.
• Another new Richard Youngs song. Then a poem, then an old Richard Youngs song.

POINTS OF VIEW

Ishmael Reed

The  pioneers and the indians

disagree about a lot of things

for example, the pioneer says that

when you meet a bear in the woods

you should yell at him and if that

doesn't work, you should fell him

The indians say that you should

whisper to him softly and call him by

loving nicknames

No one's bothered to ask the bear

what he thinks