I Must Concentrate on How Disappointing It All Has to Be While Rejoicing in My Singular Un-wholeness That Keeps It an Event for Me

L wanted to go to a No Kings so we walked the mile from our house to a protest on Rockville Pike adjacent to the Strathmore Music Hall campus. I'd guess over the course of the two hours I was there the attendance peaked at a thousand people when my senator Chris Van Hollen made his scheduled appearance for his five minute pep speech. Judging from the horns in traffic on the always busy especially on a Saturday morning Rockville Pike the overwhelming number of drivers supported the protest, but I do live in one of the bluest precincts in the bluest county of a very blue state. L got flipped a bird by one cracker in a pick-up truck (*cracker in a pickup truck* always puts a J Geils song in my head - think about it - it was in my head the whole week in Michigan for a reason), there were a few undercover cops filming and photographing, but there was no direct maga-confrontations that I saw or heard about afterward on the neighborhood listserv. I wasn't there and am not here now to snark: I wasn't a full celebrant for reasons you can no doubt guess and (are in the grid) which needn't be typed here now and which I did not share with any of the celebrants I interacted with. People liked my sub-throwing antifa guy Free DC t-shirt

Fifteen hours later at three o'clock Sunday morning we drove north on Rockville Pike past the deserted Strathmore Music Hall campus taking Rosie to be euthanized at the 24 hour emergency vet at the corner of Rockville Pike and Nicholson Lane, the only car but three others we saw on the way there. Bad thyroids and bad kidneys the two most common causes for cat deaths and Rosie had bad both, and the thyroid medicines aggravated her kidneys and her kidney medicine aggravated her thyroid. Nonetheless, she got a year and a half more of quality life than the vet's original prognosis predicted, L hydrating her via IV-drip every other day. You'll know when it's time, the vet said, when she's not living but still alive, he said, it's time. Drove back home past the deserted Strathmore Music Hall campus an hour later, Rosie in a cardboard box, now buried next to Nap and Fleabus and Momcat in L's garden. Photo below from 2012, Rosie in a cat-tunnel. I did the J Geils gag twice more, did you catch it? Looney times. As always - as always - fine metaphors abound

The Personal Politics of Hopelessness
No Kings and the Laws of Power
"A few days ago, this far-right poverty tourist & provocateur discovered Canal Street"
The Mad King's Digital Killswitch
"Do we really want a handful of Silicon Valley techno-fundamentalists to be the architects of our forever?"
How Silicon Valley Became a Center of Reactionary, Anti-Democratic Politics
"This is the establishment’s emergency brake—the advice they give when terrified of the monster the system creates. The problem is they’re more terrified of the changes required to defeat the monster than of the monster itself"
Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete
What the Fascist Tech Bros Get Wrong About Prometheus
"Liberals are NOT opposed to fascism. They support fascism as long as the Democrats are doing it quietly, behind closed doors, and with a charismatic personality"
Important to get to know your shitlords
"in sum: the Secretary of State reneged on DOJ informant deals to bargain w/ a dictator famous for crime-fighting, who did not actually fight crime but got the gang to cut violence in return for better treatment & wanted ppl who knew about that back, all so Trump could do deportation cruelty videos"
Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump
What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President
"For many young Republican professionals coming up today, especially men, performative ultrabigotry is social currency"
Her Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury
Meanwhile in Britain ☞	"All this is deranged wingnut incitement and the public should IMO be asking why they were sold irresponsible crackpots as Sensible Moderates, regardless of whether their crankery is an ideological commitment or merely tactical horseshit, and why the press keep playing along like it’s real"
The Imperial Propaganda Machine Is Failing In Unprecedented Ways
"US students all over the country attempted to build a movement just as loud and big as the No Kings rallies. It was ruthlessly stomped into the ground by college presidents and Zionist business leaders and social terrorists, with the help of the same politicians running No Kings"
The logic that helped Israeli liberals commit genocide
Why So Many Racist Group Chats?
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The candidate, the billionaires, and the Democrats
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
Vanishing act			Tyranny of false balance
How to out-troll the trolls					Running Dogs
Patriot Act		Ecological Marxism				Maggie
More proof that humans are morons
Knausgaard on Dostoyevsky and *Brothers Karamazov*
➥	I was born not only without the Knausgaard gene but had and have an allergic reaction to his fiction, but this is really good
The Many False Floors of Harry Mathews
YOUR NAME HERE					{ feuilleton }
➥	Interview w DeWitt and Gridneff, I'm a hundred pages in and, cursing myself for cursing myself, laughing out loud and enjoying - enjoying, imagine - reading a novel

HERE EVERYTHING IS STILL FLOATING

John Ashbery

But, it's because the liquor of summer nights
Accumulates in the bottom of the bottle.
Suspenders brought it to its, this, level, not
The tempest in a teapot of a private asylum, laughter on the
     back steps,

Not mine, in fine; I must concentrate on how disappointing
It all has to be while rejoicing in my singular
Un-wholeness that keeps it an event for me. These, these
    young guys
Taking a shower with the truth, living off the interest of their

Sublime receptivity in anything, can disentangle the whole
Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous
Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from,
To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,

Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy
The long sweetness of simultaneity, yours and mine, ours
    and mine,
The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem
Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.

Poetry Dissolves in Brilliant Moisture and Reads Us to Us

Fleabus day or two ago, photo by my daughter C, once upon a time I posted Fleabus photos by C almost every post. She's home this week, C, home is whole. Below the grid of words I've needed to look up reading McCarthy's *Suttree* for the very first time though the fifth or sixth start, the fuck wrong with me, Rosie, photo by C, in the big room, bottles in the window bought in the best junk store ever in Ellsworth Maine, in a month and two days L & I will drive through Ellsworth on the way to Seal Cove. I have not finished a novel, including *Suttree*, since I read and chimed like once novels chimed me when I read McCarthy's 2022 *The Passenger* earlier this year. I shouldn't have tried *Suttree* immediately done finishing *The Passenger* like I ain't've gone to Library School just done with masters in English, I blame me for the fourth or fifth failure, credit me for not going back to Library School. Grid of words I needed to look up reading McCarthy's *Suttree* only pages 1-150, lordy, the chapter when he goes to his abandoned son's burial and is physically attacked by his abandoned wife's mother, I'm not even a third through, who knows what I'm in for, I have lived a cushioned life

Abscission	The act of cutting off; severance; removal
Addorsed:	Oriented back-to-back, as of two animals or objects
Anent	With regard to, about, in respect to, as to, insofar as, inasmuch as
Austral	Designating, or pertaining to, a zone extending across North America between the Transition and Tropical zones, and including most of the United States and central Mexico except the mountainous parts
Halm:	The stem or stalk of grain of any kind, and of peas, beans, hops, etc.
Macled:	Crystallized, as in diamonds
Marcassin	French: a young wild boar
Mastic	A vague term that generally refers to fast-grab glues for tile
Mauger	In spite of; in opposition to; notwithstanding
Murrey	A dark red mulberry color
Niello	Any of several black metallic alloys of sulfur with copper, silver, or lead, used to fill an incised design on the surface of another metal
Pannier	One of a pair of baskets carried on the shoulders of a person or on either side of a pack animal.
Parget	A mixture, such as plaster or roughcast, used to coat walls and line chimneys
Relict	A species that inhabits a much smaller geographic area than it did in the past, often because of environmental change
Shrike	Any of various carnivorous songbirds of the family Laniidae, having a screeching call and a strong hooked bill and often impaling its prey on sharp-pointed thorns or barbs of wire fencing.
Spall	A piece of stone chipped off by a blow of a hammer or mallet
Trematode:	Obligate internal parasites with a complex life cycle requiring at least two...

Excellent & clarifying reiteration of Duh re: the absurdity of capitalism and the worsening clusterfuck
For instance: Culture war entrepreneurs (paramilitary advisers, talk-show hosts, think tanks, freelance debaters, televangelists…); mercenaries (various local militias and resistance groups like Proud Boys, Oath keepers and the like); foot soldiers (armies of hopeless and gullible precariat, self-declared sovereign citizens, anti-vaxers and deniers of all flavors, conspiracy theorists and various cult members). Increasing resources have gone into the machinery that maintains their functioning and efficiency as such, e.g. political rallies and events, merchandise selling, air time purchase in media, paid advisers, building of the Wall and various other embezzlement schemes, unnecessary tax cuts, and outright sabotage of the political process ultimately forcing suboptimal compromises and allocation of funds towards unproductive goals, while depleting the budget for common social projects, leading to further atrophy of productivity growth and government institutions, and general pillage of the social landscape.
How Executives and Well-Connected Investors Make Exquisitely Timed Trades in Health Care Stocks
Today in rhetorical questions: why are my tax dollars being spent to save shitlords trapped in their shitturd at the bottom of the ocean? (Letting the days go by....)
Billionaire hubris				16 Lost Islands
Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire
Crackerwhisperer has new whisper
Drugmakers Are Abandoning Cheap Generics, and Now US Cancer Patients Can’t Get Meds
You can't trust google, he types into blooger
Learning from David Graeber
Gore Vidal: Narratives of Empire
The 70 best alt-country albums
I vouch for many of those, but how can there not be at least one Lambchop album on this list?
I also major vouch for Caterina Barbieri's music
*Exile in Guyville* released 30 years ago yesterday

UPTICK

John Ashbery

We were sitting there, and   

I made a joke about how   

it doesn’t dovetail: time,   

one minute running out   

faster than the one in front   

it catches up to.   

That way, I said,   

there can be no waste.   

Waste is virtually eliminated.   

To come back for a few hours to   

the present subject, a painting,   

looking like it was seen,   

half turning around, slightly apprehensive,   

but it has to pay attention   

to what’s up ahead: a vision.   

Therefore poetry dissolves in   

brilliant moisture and reads us   

to us.   

A faint notion. Too many words,   

but precious.

A Feeling Like Being Choked Enters My Throat

Napoleon, Chirp (o Rosie, who smiles at me when I call Chirp when our eyes meet), house, I choose to enjoy this teffjilt and not griddle grief today

Doesn't rile me up like humans torturing and killing animals for sport but certainly in running for wild card spot in What Tilts Jeff! my country's motherfucking finest metaphor abounding, our colony Israel, how the West was won, how the West Bank and East Bank already are and will be ultimately won jilts Teff every time

Creeley born 95 years ago today

The best Queen song plays in my head insistently these times, it's not only the best Queen song ever it's one of the three best songs by composed by humans for humans and I'm only vouching for this one forever at this minute, have I mentioned this?

THE END

Robert Creeley

When I know what people think of me

I am plunged into my loneliness.  The grey

 

hat bought earlier sickens.

I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.

 

A feeling like being choked

enters my throat.

Hurts You to Think of Him Ranking the Conversation

Lockdown and cats and the latest cat rankings now we're tired of each other: 

1. Fleabus
2. Napoleon
3. Rosie
4. MomCat
5. Olive
6. Stanley
7. Frankie

Fleabus and Napoleon one tier, Rosie a second, Olive and Stanley a third, Frankie just eats the food, gives back nothing

There is a much larger gap between Olive/Stanley and Rosie than between Fleabus/Napoleon and Rosie, photo below

            

• No Sanders obit from me, he never would be permitted to win for reasons I'm not rebarking
• Trump permitted, will be again 
• One last time Sanders and the plague: the DNC attack on Sanders, which would have happened plague or no plague but which was urgently coordinated and implemented in late February with a brutal efficiency motherfucking professional Democrats don't want you to know they are capable, made necessary because of full knowledge of the coming collapse of the economy and the need to neuter Sanders before full effect of the kaboom common knowledge
• The virus and the cult of political leadership
• I still think our shitlords aren't the bumblefucks they play on TV, that some coordination between marketing and gaming exists, that it's not just incompetence with randomized coincidences, fellow complicit thrall
• That weird pain in your nuts and the limits of telemedicine
• Wednesday this week, the same day Sanders withdraws, the first Washington Post *the plague may not be as apocalyptic as predicted* headlines, and post Sanders withdrawal insurance stock soared
• When the head of the Catholic Church is more woke than any American politician of any umph
• Utterly believable
• The imminent financial scam crisis
• Joe Biden is evil
• Renderings
• See previous post, I wanted to test the Charley's whiteout method (my apologies, Charley, my fingers just ie because I've known many Charlies, you're the only ey) of motherfucking Democratting, I like! I'll stop.
• Prison for the dead
• Diary 6-? 
• Remember (asking me) when I posted Carl Dennis poems here all the time
• Remember (asking you) when I posted PJ Harvey songs here all the time?

THE GOD WHO LOVES YOU

Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you   

To ponder how much happier you’d be today   

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings   

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened   

Had you gone to your second choice for college,   

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted   

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music   

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.   

A life thirty points above the life you’re living   

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point   

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.   

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments   

So she can save her empathy for the children.   

And would you want this god to compare your wife   

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?   

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation   

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight   

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel   

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife   

Would have pleased her more than you ever will   

Even on your best days, when you really try.   

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives   

You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is

And what could have been will remain alive for him   

Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill   

Running out in the snow for the morning paper,

Losing eleven years that the god who loves you   

Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene   

Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him   

No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend   

No closer than the actual friend you made at college,

The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight   

And write him about the life you can talk about   

With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,   

Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

Conspiracy of Air, Conspiracy of Ice, the Silver Trout Is Thirsty for Morning, the Prairie Dog Shivers with Sweat

• Late today, dentist appointment early, then lap filled above with Rosie and Stanley instead of laptop.
• The Democratic Party as voter suppression tool of the GOP: I've been thinking about Earthgirl not voting this past Tuesday. Yes, the old conspiratorialist in me would have suggested that Triskelions ordered Team Democrat to suck this much - I mean beyond standard Triskelion orders that Team Democrat suck this much - in the two years between POTUS 12 and the 14 mid-terms to demoralize the Democratic base in a massive (and massively successful) voter suppression campaign. Planet and I have talked Democrat's suckful complicity in expanding, deepening, and accelerating the clusterfuck at Earthgirl relentlessly it's true, but Earthgirl is of her own well-informed mind (and people can vouch), and for her to say Fuck That and not walk the one hundred yards to a voting booth and not vote for the first time she's been eligible is a remarkable development.
• Actually, the old conspiratorialist in me was saying in early 2009 that the Obama presidency was ordained to lay the groundwork, under the banner of professional Democratic Liberalism, for the GOP demolition crew in 2017 and that Obama's last two years would be devoted to ensuring the death of the legacy of New Deal Democrats.
• On reading what he wrote 35 years earlier: Things are worse today, of course. The rise of Fox News, Bush Junior’s war crimes, Barack Obama’s disastrous entrenchment and expansion of the Permanent War State, the now-total takeover of society by the 1-Percenter Kleptocracy, the utter degradation of the national ‘debate’ and democracy itself:  the past's rough beasts have grown gargantuan, the lies are higher and wider, the rot is deeper. But in another sense, nothing had changed; and certainly, despite expending millions of furious words, I had changed nothing, nothing at all.
• Grapefruit moon with murmurations.
• WFMU has released it's Winter schedule. Good news! Hazleton and Jarnow and McDowell are back on the schedule! Bad news! Bodeh and Julie and Faye are gone. I wonder how this works - are DJs given the option to go or stay and all changes made according to those DJs who no longer want or are no longer able to do the show? Does Station Manager Ken look at fund-raising totals for individual DJs and say, You, get out! or, in one of his daily apoplectic fits scream I hate you, get out? When will I get my three hour show?

FOUR QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE DREAMS OF ANIMALS

Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?
  
      It is true, for the spaces of night surround them with shape and purpose, like a warm hollow below the shoulders, or between the curve of thigh and belly.
      The land itself can lie like this. Hence our understanding of giants.
      The wind and the grass cry out to the arms of their sleep as the shore cries out, and buries its face in the bruised sea.
      We all have heard barns and fences splintering against the dark with a weight that is more than wood.
      The stars, too, bear witness. We can read their tails and claws as we would read the signs of our own dreams; a knot of sheets, scratches defining the edges of the body, the position of the legs upon waking.
      The cage and the forest are as helpless in the night as a pair of open hands holding rain.

2. Do they dream of the past or of the future?

      Think of the way a woman who wanders the roads could step into an empty farmhouse one afternoon and find a basket of eggs, some unopened letters, the pillowcases embroidered with initials that once were hers.
      Think of her happiness as she sleeps in the daylilies; the air is always heaviest at the start of dusk.
      Cows, for example, find each part of themselves traveling at a different rate of speed. Their bells call back to their burdened hearts the way a sparrow taunts an old hawk.
      As far as the badger and the owl are concerned, the past is a silver trout circling in the ice. Each night he swims through their waking and makes his way back to the moon.
    Clouds file through the dark like prisoners through an endless yard. Deer are made visible by their hunger.
    I could also mention the hopes of common spiders: green thread sailing from an infinite spool, a web, a thin nest, a child dragging a white rope slowly through the sand.

3. Do they dream of this world or of another?

    The prairie lies open like a vacant eye, blind to everything but the wind. From the tall grass the sky is an industrious map that bursts with rivers and cities. A black hawk waltzes against his clumsy wings, the buzzards grow bored with the dead.
    A screendoor flapping idly on an August afternoon or a woman fanning herself in church; this is how the tails of snakes and cats keep time even in sleep.
    There are sudden flashes of light to account for. Alligators, tormented by knots and vines, take these as a sign of grace. Eagles find solace in the far glow of towns, in the small yellow bulb a child keeps by his bed. The lightning that scars the horizon of the meadow is carried in the desperate gaze of foxes.
    Have other skies fallen into this sky? All the evidence seems to say so.
    Conspiracy of air, conspiracy of ice, the silver trout is thirsty for morning, the prairie dog shivers with sweat. Skeletons of gulls lie scattered on the dunes, their beaks still parted by whispering. These are the languages that fall beyond our hearing.
    Imagine the way rain falls around a house at night, invisible to its sleepers. They do not dream of us.

4. How can we learn more?
  
    This is all we will ever know.

& if that's not enough (he says to himself in the voice of a black-and-white actor whose name is a moth that keeps avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue) to bring you home, well, there it is again, already exhausted by your efforts to make it comfortable enough to stay

• Caught last night and tweeted out. What's worse, that subhead, that Alexander says it aware of the irony, that he says it unaware of the irony?
• My apologies, but I've re-enabled the spam-blocker in comments. What was funny at a couple of dozen a day has now turned into hundreds a day - Friday and Saturday past over three hundred - and fuck that. Thanks to everyone for their comments, I understand if between the word verification to stop spambots and mediation to stop trolls you say fuckit.
• Shutdownkabuki in three paragraphs.
• Some impromptu thoughts on Left unity.
• All of you who've questioned Greenwald's motives, for what it's worth, I'm feeling you.
• A heat vampire in search of a movie deal.
• Hey, Susan's back from her hiatus!
• Was going to post three photos of Confederate flags currently leading three different articles on Salon as of 8:00 AM EDT Sunday 10/13/13 and write something about it, but fuck that every single day but especially on a Sunday of a three day weekend when nobody reads this blog, so have links, songs, a poem, and a photo of my cats:

• Purple Line!
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• I bought Evan Dara's Last Scrapbook when it came out in 1995 and - this is true  - Katie ate it, gnawed a corner of print off, slobbered all over the rest, and I forgot about it.
• Ungaretti: Sunset.
• An open letter to The Poetry Foundation, a resource I, in full disclosure, use constantly, consider invaluable. I hate research, think I have to here.
• A confession of love for alt-country.
• Alt-country? Thanks! for programming Sunday's music. LOTS of great alt-country can be found on Meredith Ochs' playlists!

JUST ANOTHER PARADIGM SHIFT

Paul Grant

Just a shadow. Hardly that. But audible.

Coming out of the woods, whispering

Happily Ever After.

                          Even in that light—

stars with the skeletons of animals

and old friends—

                       visible

to the eye behind the one always

left open on the east side of the house,

downhill. Where the coffee trees

and hemp and the graves of old dogs lie,

buried themselves in leaves and left

to the sputtering wind of memory.

& if that's not enough (he says

to himself in the voice of a black-and-white

actor whose name is a moth that keeps

avoiding the tip of his flaming tongue)

to bring you home, well, there

it is again,

              already exhausted

by your efforts to make it

comfortable

enough to stay. Impatient,

                                   already headed

back down into the woods, whispering

Once Upon A Time . . .