And the Thing Is, It Stays Still Before Speaking Of

I was sixteen, two months from seventeen, for the Bicentennial. That August, at the Montgomery County Maryland Fair, I bought this Jimmy Carter for President poster

I either lost it or tossed to my great regret now. Republicans viciously called him a communist and but he beat Gerald Ford anyway if only because of Ford's pardon of Nixon, who the face-mullet called Vance the other day said was treated unfairly by un-American Democrats. I don't remember corporate Democrats then professing their undying devotion to full capitalist exploitation like they are now as they accuse Democratic Socialists of being communists far more dangerous to the United States of Assholes' future than their genuinely fascist teammates in the Republican wing of Shitlord Inc headquarters, though they did hate Carter and worked to defeat him which is why I bought the Carter poster (and voted for him once of legal age when Reagan kicked his ass). Sigh, a week ago I was on this Lake Michigan beach at the northern tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, it feels like it was fifty years ago too

I love Swans! I did not hear or see a single thing about the United States of Assholes' 250th birthday celebrations on Leelanau, in Traverse City, on the drive to and from Traverse City from Chelsea, in Chelsea itself and in Ann Arbor the last night in Michigan when we ate at the single best Indian restaurant I know, Shalimar on Main, whereas I remember the 200th, before the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of Citizens United cemented Shitlord rule forever, as loud and buoyant and sparkly and loud and ubiquitous and, get this, relatively civil. To the best of my memory, I don't remember federal agents brazenly and proudly snatching people off the street or Gerald Ford selling his own personal currency, but it was 50 years ago and my memory's edge has dulled a bit. I hadn't read Zinn's *People's History of the United States* (I did when it first came out four years later and sealed my deal) but I already had flipped on this country. Most people then thought I was nuts and wished I'd shut up, many more more people now agree with me and wish I'd shut up. Swans?

The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning
American Necrocracy					Fireworks on Mall likely to cause hazardous air pollution, documents show
250 Years of American State Capitalism
"The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine"
Shitlords are financing the fossil fuel industry’s next growth strategy
"we are one john roberts heart attack away from the complete dissolution of the reconstruction amendments and instantiation of a formalized caste system"
I. Hate. Motherfucking. Professional. Liberals
"It’s simply mind blowing how the only two constants in American politics are everyone hates the leaders of the Democratic Party and no one in the Democratic Party will ever even suggest replacing the leaders of the Democratic Party"
Will socialism kill the Democratic Party?
"If you want to understand why so many young people in the United States think that they live in an effective one-party state, where the labels ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are nothing but marketing ploys to sell the same policies, Hillary Clinton’s recent article in the Financial Times is a useful primer"
Dinosaur Democrats Meet Asteroid					Why It Looks Like Americans Don't Care
I. HATE. MOTHERFUCKING. DEMOCRATS.
Frothers on Parade			Kick them when they're down
What if democratic socialism replaces liberalism as the grammar of American political culture?
Small Is Still Beautiful: The Real Political Realignment
The Middle East, Hormuz and the New Mercantilism
As an expat who abandoned the Catholic Church at thirteen almost 54 years ago I can testify this is gospel truth
From Pews to Pew Pews, Some Churches Are Becoming a Training Ground for War
Heather Cox Richardson, Embubbled Liberal
Virtue Signaling: the First Culture War’s assault on art
We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths
Welcome To Your Midsummer Shuffling Of Deck Chairs In Third Class
County w 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’
"Moneymaking run"				The "real" sin of Sodom
Blood, sweat, tears, urine					{ feuilleton }
A BLOOMSDAY DEFERRED & EXIT MOMENTUM: THE PRODUCT, GRATIS
The below mentions Guston's friendship with Clark Coolidge, hence the Coolidge poem at bottom of post
Philip Guston’s Lines of Poetry
László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails
William T. Vollmann is dying. In his Sacramento studio, he talks America, unfinished work, and the 3,096-page opus he finished just in time
Some Kind of Fun: Hüsker Dü’s Generational Blues

BUT IT SAYS NOTHING

Clark Coolidge

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet

as if to say nothing moves me. Then

there is the chair. And one speaks of

the chair sitting at the table.

Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.

The object is a piece of thing before. One

shifts in a chair and opens the talk.

And the time it says nothing one moves.

The table is too long as the wall. Not

a thing but it stays and one opens

as a mouth will begin. Speaking of

the table, nothing but to avoid that of

the wall. One could return over and over

to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.

Least ways it says nothing. And the

thing is, it stays still before

speaking of. The object of nothing, even

speech.

The Sane Unbenumbed Person Tongue-Tied, Sane with Gratitude and Terror

Old self-portrait, 2020, before the plague, from a time when canvases were tablets, reminded of it when struggling yesterday to keep my mouth shut and facial expression blank when a colleague at work expressed outrage at a video Trump released of Gaza as the Riviera of the Levant complete with shirtless Trump and Bibi on beach chairs drinking cocktails with little paper umbrellas. Biden would never do this! he/she/they, outraged, barked, neglecting to cite the joe responsible for the destruction depicted at the beginning of the video, and it occurred to me that without these grids & hexjeffs my keeping my mouth shut and face straight an impossibility

The empire at its most honest
"Lawmakers in Alabama are expanding police immunity so that it's harder to sue cops for excessive force. The mask is off. Politicians want state-sanctioned violence to go unpunished. Everyone should be outraged about this. America is a fascist police state"
"Barack Obama signed $8.3 billion in cuts to SNAP. Dems didn't say a word. Joe Biden ended pandemic emergency measures resulting in 15 million Americans being thrown off Medicaid. Democrats silent. Again. The proposed cuts to SNAP and Medicaid by Republicans are draconian and inhumane. But if you're only speaking out when the GOP does it, and either ignore it or make excuses when Democrats do it, it's probably not Medicaid and SNAP you really care about"
Capital as Power in the 21st Century
"I Believe The World Is Ending - Does That Make Me Crazy?"
The Path to American Authoritarianism
"President of the United States posts video of him taking over Gaza with his statue for worship, dollars raining, Trump Gaza as centrepiece as he & Netanyahu chill at the beach. Ethnic cleansing rebranded as a real estate deal. Colonialist White Supremacist Zionism. Pure Evil"
⇧	"If you're old and slow like me, then that Trump Gaza video goes too quick to absorb its full insanity. So I took a few screenshots for you to digest at leisure. This is something genuinely posted by *the President of The United States Of America*.						⇧
The worldwide assault on working people
"Disgusting. I mean, the way a pile of pig offal or a bucket of chum or an overfull latrine is disgusting. The stench is permanent"
America First Deepens World Stagnation
⬇	"The Washington Post and LA Times editorial pages have gone full MAGA, MSNBC has purged all of its anti-Trump anchors, and Twitter is owned by a literal Nazi. Here's why liberal media bias is still a problem"						⬇
Bezos announces the Washington Post editorial page will exist solely to justify Bezos' shitlordly magnificence
⇧	"You might think Bezos is contradicting himself by declaring that all his minions must conform and support "personal liberties" on threat of expulsion. But for the US ruling classes, "liberty" has always meant "property", not "ideological freedom""						⇧
⇧	"Declaring that "personal liberties" are your north star in the same email where you're announcing that you're banning all views but your own from the newspaper is a helluva thing"						⇧
⇧	"Jeff, hi — now that the Washington Post oped page will become purely devoted to free markets, you should hire me to write about how Amazon's thousands of patents are a dangerous violation of free market principles"						⇧
"One reason (of many) that the very rich are "anti-government" is that they're not reliant on any govt services because they're rich. Courier services, private attorneys, private schools, cars and taxis, private playgrounds. In their minds "no one" uses public services, because no one they know does"
"Praise Jesus, we successfully voted to take food and healthcare from poor people to benefit the rich. Amen.”
"To Increase Government Efficiency, Every Federal Employee Must Write an Email No One Will Read"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
"This is not a political party right now. It is a country club for careerists who are happy to ride out the inferno in their luxury bunker"
Motherfucking Democrats hate you more than they hate magacrackers and it ain't even close
"We wanted to know how to make the Democratic party relevant again. So we talked to James Carville, Bill Maher, and Matt Yglesias"
Today in I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.
For shitlibs, it's not the genocide itself - who was the president that supplied the weapons and OKed the destruction depicted? Undersold, understated, denied genocide OK, tacky celebrated genocide icky. Shitlibs are shitty
(a) call them mercenaries and (b) the pigstool knows America has always employed mercenaries to do off-the-books wetwork so what he is calling for is on-the-books wetwork with all than implies both on-the-book and off in the future
"A major factor for why we are where we are is because for the last three decades, we’ve slopped up tons of movies and TV shows instilling the idea there are actually really cool billionaires and few if any about really cool forest rangers and VA staff"					Ubiquitous Evil
YES	Brief history of Israel’s theft and trafficking of Palestinian organs
"the irony of receiving rape threats from zionists over an essay i wrote about zionists sexually assaulting people really does just speak for itself"
The World After Gaza (w/ Pankaj Mishra)
The Supreme Court just gave scammers and robocallers the legal right to endlessly spam your phone and harass you
The decoupling of urban and rural America
"If we do not hate the internet, what we detest is its capture, enclosure and transformation by Big Tech’s nexus of billionaire oligarchs and finance capitalists."
Maggie's		Today in Rhetorical Questions!
The Reliquary Translations (37, 38, 40, 43)
Why Is There the Amount of Art That There Is?
Things Brad Learned in the Fire: On the Destruction (and Rebirth) of a Bookstore
Elizabeth Bishop's grandparents					{ feuilleton }
There's a word for that			Percival Everett interview
Krasznahorkai interview					#1467 The long journey
Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate
Mark Ford on a new Anthony Hecht biography
NEW JENNY HVAL ALBUM IN MAY, NEW SONG NOW!
Autechre Announce North America and UK Tour					☞	They are playing Detroit the same week in October I'll be in Chelsea visiting my daughter and son-in-law, hmmm
NEW SWANS!					☞	Album out in May, no US tour dates as yet, new song	⬇

THE FACE

Franz Wright

Is there a single thing in nature

that can approach in mystery

the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then   

its transformation from childhood to old age—

We are surrounded at every instant   

by sights that ought to strike the sane   

unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute   

with gratitude and terror. However,

there may be three sane people on earth   

at any given time: and if

you got the chance to ask them how they do it,   

they would not understand.

I think they might just stare at you

with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile

the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret   

preoccupation with their origins, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure   

one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;   

or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who’s waking up,

to prove no harm awaits him, you’ve dealt with and banished all harm.

time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation

Trump crowned himself king yesterday and everybody yawned



Another clusterfuck spew of duh: getting harder and harder coming up with any insight on the clusterfuck that's even a smidgen different than previous grievous insights on the clusterfuck, on the shitlords running the world who can conceive of no greater goal than complete and ultimate wealth extraction and your absolute adoration have decided that the maximum wealth achievable only by making everything shittier 

All shitlord psyop narratives are ordained, designed, and implemented with primary goal of increasing fear and crippling anxiety in the herd for its subordination and exploitation. Yesterday RFK Jr announced a war on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, no hiding behind a medical veil from your misery and fear, you peasant and pagan. You must feel the weight and power of your gods and worship in fear of their awesome and vengeful omnipotence. This motherfucker, for instance, this one too





That's my right eye as an avenging killer drone, I daydream of photon-torpedoing shitlords on their yacht decks. Almost 18 hours after Trump crowned himself king there is still no mention of it on the front webpage of the Washington Post and New York Times, and my Shitter and BluePlace timelines have precious few posts bitching about Trump's announcement of our new feudal authoritarianism. We are so fucked

Michael Gira is 71 today. I'm stupid for Swans, stupid, one of only a few bands in permanent orbit for the three rotating spots in my abandoned Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Play it loud, fellowmofo peasant pagan

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship
"But we need to lose the theory that these Dems are “spineless” and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as “Bernie Bros” with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing"
➥	Psst, they work hand in glove with the GOP for their mutual shitlord bosses, and Democrats' *Job One* is to protect the shitlords' left flank, sorry for the duh, I'm just seeing people suggesting Democrats aren't doing their job. They are						⇧
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump
➥	"This rare cross-ideological alignment has created an opening for the Trump-Musk-Vance team, which, thanks to the Democratic pullback from “woke-ism,” faces scant opposition as it busily dynamites a civil-rights infrastructure built painstakingly over generations"						⇧
➥	"Democrats scheduled social media posts are so funny, always completely random, unrelated to what else is going on. Makes it seem like they are truly unaware of what's happening. It's 2025 and they're waiting to get the morning paper from a newsie on the corner on their way into the office"						⇧
Not 13 flags, not 15 flags, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" 14 flags
H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Perils of Forgetting
"In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business"
The top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington quit today, citing pressure by the Trump administration to open what she viewed as an improper criminal probe of a federal contract
"Israeli forces strapped explosives around the neck of an elderly Palestinian who used a walking stick and forced him to inspect areas used by Hamas before killing him and his wife"
⇧	"Soldiers put an explosive cord around the man's neck and forced him to scout buildings for eight hours. After his release, another division shot him dead						⇧
Forever War for Profit: The United States, Israel/Palestine, and the Global Corporate Security Economy
The Dangerous Game US Jewry is Playing with America's White Supremacists
"Zionist Shots Zionists - Both Blame Arabs"
America is a full blown kleptocracy
There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
"i feel like this is evidence for my view that people experience trump through a strong form of ironic detachment. they literally do not perceive him as real"
⇧	Forgive me, I need to screaminly reiterate that these shitord-released crackers and christers ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO AND HAVE BEEN SAYING THEY ARE GOING TO DO SINCE ALWAYS						⇩
➥	Yes, shitlords implement disaster capitalism and disaster nationalism to extract max profit BFFS many of them genuinely believe this is true and see themselves as noble warriors fighting a holy war, BELIEVE THEM WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE!						⇩
➥	"The West is obviously superior. We had a pagan religion infiltrate our universities and our society, and that religion basically said that everything good about America and everything that has actually worked… is bad.”						⇩
"Here's my prediction from 2008: "The days of a rational American empire are drawing to a close. We'll be forced to discard either the empire part, or the rational part. And based on 10,000 years of human history, I'm guessing it's the rational part that will go."
Trump's stab at Napoleonicity
"Billionaire finds it strange that people can't afford kids in a world where artificial scarcity intentionally withholds food, water, housing, healthcare, and everything else in a ploy to extract indentured servitude out of us all"
We might have to "shut down the country"
"Trump’s tariffs will escalate exploitation and desperation of US workers. That’s the point"
Conservatism and the Decline of the West
This is not a test				Which of course puts this song in my head and on repeat
"I’m deriving a certain grim amusement from the unnatural intellectual acts that right wing law professors with an eye to the main chance are currently performing, in the face of the most corrupt and most public quid pro quo in the history of the American presidency"
"I would read an intellectual history about how a body of thought that provided the ideological foundations for regicide got reduced to the means by which opinion columnists tut-tut activists for shutting down events"
The making of emergencies					Unhinged
"JD Vance Called Me a 'Dummy' for Pointing Out His Administration's Hypocrisy on Free Speech. I Guess the Truth Hurts"			We Are All Porn Actors
States and the Coming Scam-Apocalypse
Wrestling, cannabis, bitcoin and stocks
Inside Project 2025				"The usual dance of “moderate” Republicans complaining about everything they just voted for when it affects them. Rinse, repeat"
If You Only Watch One Thing Today, Please Watch This
"In the span of a day, Trump's "immigration czar" called for a criminal investigation of a member of Congress for informing immigrants of their rights, while Trump's co-president called for the imprisonment of journalists for basic video editing"
Libertarianism is a form of white supremacy
"Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth"
How Biden set the stage for GOP budget cuts
"I want to thank Nancy Pelosi for her devoted work in keeping Henry Cuellar in office. If the Democratic Party did not support him, you might end up with a guy who always votes with Donald Trump, and that would be awful'
Today in I Hate Motherfucking Democrats	☞	"You passionately supported the premiere murderer of the overwhelming majority of these journalists: Israel. It’s astonishing you would have the audacity to tweet this given your personal role in facilitating Israel’s killing spree unleashed again our colleagues"
Two 66 year old Democratic senators announce they will not run for reelection in the 2026 midterms and it's not because the Democratic Party is renouncing its gerontocracy
Delaware Decides Delaware Law Has No Value
➥	Today's monologue: you do realize, yes? that smart shitlords recognize total catastrophic social breakdown hours, not minutes, ahead, and are working their three private jets and four luxury yachts and six Micronesian islands and two luxury bomb shelters to boom NOW!						⇩
I agree that the size of Juan Soto's contract is morally wicked but I don't think that's what these dopes meant in this headline
Reminder: xymphora			Profiles in polroonery
Maggie's		Avedon Carol's occasional links
The Eternal Mysteries of Red
Loose leash		Song and sadness			{ feuilleton }
Where did all the fiction in fiction go?
The Biggest Little Press in the World
Richard Dawson, his music as important to me at this moment in my life as any musician at any point of my life

A PLAGUE OF POETS

C.D. Wright

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough.

Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators.