Born 116, Born 113 Years Ago Today

• Mark Rothko, born 116 years ago today. Love, plus any excuse to post Feldman, search Rothko for more, click Shostakovich tag for more, click Feldman tag for more

 

• Shostakovich born 113 years ago

 

  
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that the world is brutal and coarse

• Major chapter in William Vollmann's Europe Central. I'm reading it again.
• The axle character on which all spokes spin is Shostakovich, and this chapter provides necessary biographical and historical background of his relationship with Soviet authorities before then during The Terror, then the Great Patriotic War, then after.
• The axle theme on which everything Vollmann writes spins is Power: application, resistance to, my complicity.
• Always topical, some times more than others.
• Fucker can write but bosses you around, shoves you into Black Marias, dungeons, squeezes your ouchies (in every novel, not just this one, not just this one and the Dreams).
• I wince and read (I also laugh out loud sometimes).
• Power, its application, resistance to it, my complicity.
• Anyway, I've a PDF of the chapter, if you ask nice and I like you I'll send it to you password-free.

• That's a main character in Europe Central.
• Akhmatova's a character in the novel too, she's in this chapter, and - Serendipitously - this was posted here Monday.
• When a colleague of many years tastes power and the entire department's frequencies vrzzt.
• Dynamite for the People. A history.
• Jim's Icelandic adventure, part nine.
• It wasn't me who uhoh-ed the awooga. I knew it was awooga, would never awooga first.
• This is a main character in Europe Central.

THE LAST TOAST

Anna Akhmatova

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.
-

Translated by Stanley Kunitz

Beyond Mergers and Acquisitions

• Congratulations Elric & Janet!
• Seven rules for running a real Left-wing government.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Cargo culting.
• Elkin's Dick Gibson Show is reviewed in NYT in Sept 2017?
• UPDATE! Good thing!
• A long excerpt from DGS from August 2016 when I was rereading for umpteenth time.
• The Glass Essay.
• REJECTION LETTER! Thank you for submitting to the Painted Bride Quarterly. While we appreciate your time and effort in writing the submission titled "[..stuff..]," we regret to inform you that we're not able to accept your work at this time. Please continue to read PBQ and best of luck to you. 
• Received today, minutes ago. Submission sent May 2016. 
• Knew it, figured I'd never get response.
• Inks and washes: I haven't in.
• Rulers, quads, beer bottle circles: nope, nope, nope.
• Can't read either. 
• Can hike with Earthgirl. All's good.
• Shostakovich born 111 years ago today. It's not his fault I don't hear his music as well as once.
• Click here for much more.

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

Edward Hirsch

Beyond junk bonds and oil spills,

beyond the collapse of Savings and Loans,

beyond liquidations and options on futures,

beyond basket trading and expanding foreign markets,

the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard

& Poor's stock index, mutual funds, commodities,

beyond the rising tide of debits and credits,

opinion polls, falling currencies, the signs

for L. A. Gear and Coca Cola Classic, 

the signs for U.S. Steel and General Motors,

hi-grade copper, municipal bonds, domestic sugar,

beyond fax it and collateral buildups,

beyond mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts,

hostile takeovers, beyond the official policy

on inflation and the consensus on happiness,

beyond the national trends in buying and selling,

getting and spending, the market stalled

and the cost passed on to consumers,

beyond the statistical charts on prices,

there is something else that drives us, some

rage or hunger, some absence smoldering

like a childhood fever vaguely remembered

or half-perceived, some unprotected desire,

greed that is both wound and knife,

a failed grief, a lost radiance.

Alone with Our Madness and Favorite Flower We See That There Really Is Nothing Left to Write About

• Windows tells me I have that much time to upgrade to Windows 10 or - what? Would I regret forever upgrading? My assumption is Windows will support 7 until there is an 11, and by the time there is an 11 I will be in motherfucking MacLand.
• Today is the only practical day for me to do the upgrade before the deadline, so, if you never hear from me again.....
• America Again: a Long Rant. A righteous one at that.
• Wait, said my Hillaryite Friend, you're saying you approve of the Kaine pick? I said, as a political strategy, yes. Lordy, the Liberal pundits are SQUEALING IN GLEE at being Kained. He's not just the anti-Trump, he's the anti-Hillary, standing before cameras and talking-wise. He will be the good Democratic dad of the campaign. HF said, laughing, so Kaine thinks he's Gore 1992 or Biden 2008? I said, Chelsea will let him know in 2022, and HF will buy me a pint next time we pint.
• Could Hillary Clinton become the champion of the 99%? the New York Times breathlessly asks! No.
• Reminder: Hillary Clinton supports Israel's apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
• Tim Kaine, and other faith-based politics.
• Reminder: you, you fucking hippie, while Democrats mock Trump at convention, they hate you more.
• Hillaryian Loyalty! 
• UPDATE! Wasserman out, not for what she did but because she got caught and it went public.
• UPDATE! Hillary would behead Chelsea on live TV if she thought it would help her politically.
• This is the sublede on a front page Washington Post story by Karen Tumulty: Her startling decision to run for the highest office in America set Clinton — who had already been first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state — on a path no woman has ever walked. Startling decision? Startling decision? Startling decision?
• I didn't read the story - Washington Post wants me to pay for it, and sheeyit.
• So yes, it's a lame pun, but the word Left in this post's title why today this poem.
• On the Trump/KGB connection.
• Invalidating Darwish's identity card.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links. 
• ROKY ERICKSON DOCUMENTARY! Saw this after posting the Shostakovich or there would have been Erickson songs today. Tomorrow.
• Julian Barnes has written a novel about Shostakovich? Shostakovich starred in Vollmann's Central Europe, so I've already done one novel with him. Barnes has never sung to me, but Dmitri?

LATE ECHO

John Ashbery

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

Born One-Hundred Nine Years Ago Today

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Dark Days When I Awaken So I Slump

• The poem I started last night shouts at me this morning. Lordy, my jones for louder and quieter.
• We all hate the lion-killer. Here's a comment I wrote on the post when I was lion-killer hating: Fuck humans, of which I insist I'm not worst (egoist that I am) but am amply shitty. What appears in this post bears little to what I first wrote. I wished the fucker professional ruin, which I stand by as his profession affords him his killing trips. I wished for ruin in his personal life too. So, I was wishing harassment on his employees (like he would answer the phones for me to tell him to fuck off or open all new suspicious mail etc) and pain on his loved ones, some of whom, though they love him, may not be despicable fucks themselves.
• So yes, fuck me.
• Capitalism.
• My Favorite POTUS. I like you, Jimmy, but things same as they ever was.
• The Cimmerian Hypothesis, part three.
• And you thought Greece had a problem.
• In Ewigkeit.
• He does not wear bladder-leak pants.
• Nearby is the country they call life.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.
• The new Vollmann isn't working. An old McElroy isn't working. The new Jeremy Davies is sort of working but not like it should. The new Matthea Harvey was working but now it isn't. So fuck me.

THE HURT SONNET

Casey Thayer

Dark days when I awaken so I slump
                    back to the swamp of his armpit, a whit

from the arachnid he inked to the stump
           that's left. So close to the vestige of it,


                                 the danger he's a reliquary of:
            tattooed noose to venerate the fist

                     of a slug buried still in his butt above
a white cross for the men he didn't miss.

                                          

           If only I could strip off the black map
I sleep against and be his liniment,

                   gloss over the explosion, the mishap
                              phantom he feels in a forearm itch.

             

            He won't leave the long tale his tattoos read
                    for me, so I amend the story.

              

He Is Learning, Well Behind His Desperate Eyes, the Epistemology of Loss

• Shostakovich was born 108 years ago today. MSADI5G, High Egoslavian Holy Day.
• Think of others.
• The War Machine. Had Bush the audacity Obama has for Executive Power we would have howled. Oh, wait, we did howl. But... But... Isis! Xena the Warrior Princess' hot girlfriend.
• The NFL is the bell cow of empire.
• Though I'd never heard of Bill Simmons until this.
• Speaking of fine metaphors abounding, it was driving me fucking nuts, where I had seen the actress who plays Ezri Dax in Deep Space Nine's final season, she was Laura in the KITH skit I use for fine metaphors abounding. Um, fine metaphors abound.
• Sloan. Luther Sloan.
• It is an interesting development, this new POTUS has no power so therefore POTUS has all power.
• Reminder: motherfucking Democrats.
• Mediation: anarchism.

• While I'm scratching apostasy's scabs, let me thank DC United, who wanted to charge me $20 + $10 parking + $10 for crappy beer to see a Wednesday night game v some scrub team from Panama? where? Fuck you. This should be Special Game B out of three in a season ticket package. What? There's no Game A?
• Whew. That was close, that nostalgia-stroke of two days ago. I may not go to another game this year. I owe some faiths nothing.
• Bad love is easy to do. 

• Fred!
• This is true: I really do think, when I post a Peter Jefferies post, that people know who Peter Jefferies is.
• The Opposite of Icarus.
• Radical linguistics in an age of extinction.
• A writer died today.
• Hilary Mantel, for those of you who do.
• The idiotic fuss over Mantel's new book.
• I swear to Baal, I'm getting closer to getting it. And when I do, this blog will really suck.
• Jeremiah Cymereman pieces, for those of you who do.
• Yes, it's Mark Rothko's birthday too. Later today, with the requisite Morton Feldman piece.
• Grouper.
• Click the Shostakovich tag for more Shostakovich, click the Berryman tag for more Berryman.

THE BALL POEM

John Berryman

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball.

What, what is he to do? I saw it go

Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then

Merrily over—there it is in the water!

No use to say 'O there are other balls':

An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy

As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down

All his young days into the harbour where

His ball went. I would not intrude on him,

A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now

He senses first responsibility

In a world of possessions. People will take balls,

Balls will be lost always, little boy,

And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.

He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,

The epistemology of loss, how to stand up

Knowing what every man must one day know

And most know many days, how to stand up

And gradually light returns to the street,

A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight.

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark

Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,

I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

With all that move me, under the water

Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

"When I woke up Mayakovsky He Was a Lot More Prompt," the Sun Said Petulantly

• Mstislav Rostropovich was born 87 years ago today. 
• The pianist in Shostakovich's Cello Sonata is Benjamin Britten, btw.
• Today's links while they're fresh.
• Protesting police violence in Albuquerque.
• Democrats are doomed.
• John Podesta's heroic battle against straw men.
• Destination Culture.

• Goats are more clever than previously thought.
• Crow is alive.
• What is forgetting?
• On the latest Jonathan Littell.
• What enemies say picking.
• Commercial Opportunities. Tom's latest.
• Hejinian, Whitman, and the politics of sleep.
• It's still Frank O'Hara's birthday.

A TRUE ACCOUNT OF TALKING TO THE SUN AT FIRE ISLAND

Frank O'Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying "Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don't be so rude, you are

only the second poet I've ever chosen

to speak to personally

                                  so why

aren't you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day."

                    "Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal."

"When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt" the Sun said

petulantly. "Most people are up

already waiting to see if I'm going

to put in an appearance."

                                       I tried

to apologize "I missed you yesterday."

"That's better" he said. "I didn't

know you'd come out." "You may be

wondering why I've come so close?"

"Yes" I said beginning to feel hot

wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me

anyway.

              "Frankly I wanted to tell you

I like your poetry. I see a lot

on my rounds and you're okay. You may

not be the greatest thing on earth, but

you're different. Now, I've heard some

say you're crazy, they being excessively

calm themselves to my mind, and other

crazy poets think that you're a boring

reactionary. Not me.

                                 Just keep on

like I do and pay no attention. You'll

find that people always will complain

about the atmosphere, either too hot

or too cold too bright or too dark, days

too short or too long.

                                 If you don't appear

at all one day they think you're lazy

or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.

And don't worry about your lineage

poetic or natural. The Sun shines on

the jungle, you know, on the tundra

the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were

I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting

for you to get to work.

                                    And now that you

are making your own days, so to speak,

even if no one reads you but me

you won't be depressed. Not

everyone can look up, even at me. It

hurts their eyes."

                          "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!"

"Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's

easier for me to speak to you out

here. I don't have to slide down

between buildings to get your ear.

I know you love Manhattan, but

you ought to look up more often.

                                                    And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space. That

is your inclination, known in the heavens

and you should follow it to hell, if

necessary, which I doubt.

                                          Maybe we'll

speak again in Africa, of which I too

am specially fond. Go back to sleep now

Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem

in that brain of yours as my farewell."

"Sun, don't go!" I was awake

at last. "No, go I must, they're calling

me."

        "Who are they?"

                                  Rising he said "Some

day you'll know. They're calling to you

too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Born 116, 110 & 107 Years Ago Today

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulker, Light in August.

Mark Rothko born 110 years ago today. And one more piece of Shostakovich, born 107 years ago today.

A Beautiful Cacaphony Flutters in the Brightness of the Dead Calm as True Objects Lost in the Politeness Fill the Grail of a New Primitive

• Dmitri Shastokovich was born 107 years ago today. High Egoslavian Holy Day. I don't play the Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game with composers, though if I did Shostakovich would have a permanent seat.
• You're stupid, therefore I'm smart, QED.
• I'm told an unprincipled elitish asshole is an ambitious hypocrite who cares only for his own political fortune, goddamn the health of the nation if necessary. Oh my.
• And now that bet is paid off, G.
• Robert Reich, Inequality's Intellectual Fraudster.
• Dear James Goodale: the culture of lying is a feature, not a bug.
• I am snubbed again.
• Deleuze, for those of you who do, or: Life and the writer again.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• Alcohol + syndrome + painting.
• The argument over Coetzee.
• On hating Mumford & Sons. You could play me a mega-big Mumford & Sons song, I've no doubt heard it, I couldn't identify it. I have heard what the act is and have heard the hate.
• The dress code of Mumford & Sons.
• Mingus.
• Gaddis's letters. He's America's best unknown writer?

TRIPTYCH FOR BELIEVERS

Richard Tagett

I

Hung up on body parts in the particulate daylight, you step out of a Beckett play to find yourself in a memory resisting itself, as meat hits the fan so to speak against the white blanket of the grainy void. You never know where it’s going, the body, the boy swathed in bullets with those black eyes pissing a letter-opener in the desert mud near a disabled Mercedes. When things enter the room you think bazooka and check your hat. A puddle of warm ice-cream in anticipation. Here’s where Coney Island drops like a discarded napkin and you can’t go home again. Mucous brimming the banks, a cake of dust in the shape of a rocking chair ticking away. But soon it will snow as exquisite dogs languish from inside a sandwich tied to a parachute. No time for ballads, the table is set.

II

Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.

III

The music is an absence of colliding masses. You can cut your feet on the proverbial and be too close to hear it, the other music, the suffocation of things that can’t fly. A beautiful cacophony flutters in the brightness of dead calm as true objects lost in the politeness of daylight fill the grail of a new primitive. You choke on little candles and all through the night your legs cramp in the sweat of the moonlight. For no good reason a tenderness of geese is billowing in the curtains, as holes in the face open and close and paper scorches sky with futile encryption. Those armchairs foundering in the scum of the surf. Deafness craving disaster green in the spine, knowing the cocktail party’s over. Now it’s all red and your lips are trembling in believability, but it’s only a flickering image in the dark quadrant of your eye bending the light as they mow the daisies under the stars, for no good reason.