Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone

• Iggy's 71 today.
• So Powers' Overstory broke the sweet run of reading focus, and I remember everything I don't like about Powers which reminds me too much of a few things I don't like about me. 
• Too much undergirding with short cuts in service of ideas so self-evident to me I can't be bothered with honest but boring joist buttressing, for instance.
• See, a young woman, stoned and naked, electrocutes herself on a shoddy light switch and dies for two minutes, when she revives she's anew, knows her past life a sham, and tree spirits talk to her now! 
• Also too: the hero of the novel are trees and trees are going to lose and I can't take it, another thing I don't like about me.
• Horrible writing dialogue, Powers and also too me, and I'm better, for fuck's sake. 
• I miss writing dialogue, but not as much as I miss Thursday Night Pints.
• Gist: joist.
• Here's Olive last night:

• The above bigger at other place.
• Coexistence III.
• War profiteers v people of the United States.
• Law is a flag, and gold the wind that makes it wave.
• You can't handle the truth.
• So, I'll set Overstory aside and perhaps pick it up again, though I can't ever imagine doing so. 
• Picked up Murnane again, me and my addictions. 
• UPDATE! Murnane, too soon. I remember everything I don't like about Murnane which reminds me too much of a few things I don't like about me.
• Too much undergirding with faith that the image of books on the Hungarian Revolution on a bookshelf I can see from under the bed in the downstairs basement of my maternal grandparents house in 1968 while my grandmother, who doesn't know I'm under the bed, curses out my crippled grandfather for his uselessness resonates as much as life defining moment to you in the millionth gong as it does to me in my billionth. 
• In good news, it only took 58 and a half years but Dickinson finally sings to me, her Dark helping unDark me. Better yet: Dark me.
• Robert Smith 59 today.

SAFE IN THEIR ALABASTER CHAMBERS

Emily Dickinson

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -

Untouched by Morning - 

and untouched by noon -

Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, 

Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - 

 

Grand go the Years, 

In the Crescent above them -

Worlds scoop their Arcs - 

and Firmaments - row -

Diadems - drop -

And Doges surrender -

Soundless as Dots, 

On a Disk of Snow.

Final in His Brutal, His Total, Rejection of It All

Beloved L, former professor, dear friend, mainstay of the late, desperately missed Thursday Night Pints, one of only two people in my lifetime who tell me they genuinely like what I do in tablets and the only person over the years to encourage me to seek to get it published by a non-vanity press, has through loving emotional blackmail coerced me to submit 25 of these to a press accepting submissions for a 2016 Spring chapbook. I haven't submitted anything for publication since before I met Earthgirl. I have an old small cigar box of rejection notices from the late 70s, early 80s, I'm curious what my reaction will be to the one upcoming. The above and below were two of the 25 submitted. You've seen and forgotten them here.

Serendipitously re: top poem, last night someone tweeted Watching an old movie about a gorilla who was turned into a human lady and she turns back into a gorilla when she gets horny and I replied, I think her brother did the same when he had a crush on 99, quite possibly as obscure a Get Smart allusion as I'm capable. See? SEE? My ambition knows no bounds.

• I'll let you know if I get a form rejection or a personal rejection.
• Alignment - related to this post, of sorts, though more.
• Night visitors.
• All your past lives flashing before your eyes.....
• L also encourages me to write about my poetry here, as in, why, etc, but don't worry - she hasn't yet emotionally blackmailed me into that yet, and I will resist.
• Because while I don't have a system - systems are bullshit, yo - and I don't have theories - theories aren't bullshit but they are biased and unreliable - I do have rules, which I love to worry to the exclusion sometimes of anything else and which change by the minute as I need them too. In my poetry too.
• Into the whirlpool, where matter vanishes.
• 35.
• Thomas Pynchon's ancestor wrote the first book banned and burned in America?
• Bill Knott's rejection slips.
• This an addendum to bullet below - the musician in the below youtube always makes me think of the musician in the youtube below the not-my poem.
• My friend's daughter's new portrait of her father put this song in my head!

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

Your Chordal List of Hates

Two new Stephin Merritt songs, Lo and La, for Lola the rat terrier who steals the show.

It wasn't Thursday Night Pints (which are no more) though I did have a pint with a friend last night. She's an unabashed mainstream Democrat and enthusiastic Inevitability proponent. It's important to her that a woman wins POTUS, and frankly that symbolism is the ONLY reason I don't find the thought of Inevitability A-to-Z repugnant. Think of how it will make rightwingers nuts, N said. If on the day after Obama won POTUS in 2008, I said, you'd told me that in 2015 there would be a mass public revulsion against the Confederate flag with concurrent rightwing freakout and that conservative SCOTUS judges would uphold a health care bill deemed socialist by rightwingers with concurrent rightwing freakout, and these had happened in the same week, I not only wouldn't believe you but would have signed on for that comedy blockbuster in a nanosecond. N said, I know you're disappointed with Democrats in particular and Obama in general, but the anti-Confederacy bullshit doesn't make you happy? I haven't been taking my daily tribal viagra for years, I said, I can't achieve a boner much less a flaggasm.

• UPDATE! And now Scalia, Alito, and Thomas lose on gay marriage. I am small enough, I confess, to relish the thought of their heads exploding.
• UPDATE! OK, I confess, I'm feeling some tiny reawakening of schadenfreude over this one. 
• UPDATE! OK, it's gone. 
• White American terrorists.
• Meet the new police reform bosses.
• The failure of utopian desire.
• There is no Baltimore City in Larry Hogan's Maryland.
• Martin O'Malley couldn't get his Lt Gov elected over GOP buffoon Larry Hogan in an overwhelmingly blue state and daydreams that someday he will be POTUS.
• Studying the ashes under the stars.
• Zombie gets death scare, thankfully is OK, makes Nick Cave allusion.
• Sylvia Plath reading her poetry.
• Thomas Bernhard, for those of you who do.

ARGUMENT OVER, AMOUNTING

Clark Coolidge

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t

the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally

and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan
    

You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite

your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready

receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat

behind the one you there are
   

Then the I not part of the you equation, but the

spider trying to build where it is written

vibrates tentative

I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore

crystal region in its light, there are failures and

there are failures
   

But it’s imperative, abrupt catch, that you sink the

final catch, trounced morning

this is awful but none other available, words reach

and visually fail to tie audibly retire

the pieces of the opening collision, and the reaches of

turning aside remind
   

I am hopefully

this is position

of the world overcome by

and by the wind takes our voice

the collateral one voice

   

The Stranded Whale, Guided Out of the Coves by Tugboats

Robert Pollard is fifty-seven today and today is a High Egoslavian Holy Day. Lots of songs here. Yes, these three songs, along with this shitty blog's Theme Song Three are my four most air-guitared Pollard songs. Also too, we're going hiking, today, tomorrow, Sunday. Just this: had a coffee with a friend yesterday who brought along a friend who's still a devout Lesshittiest, he's hyperventilating the mid-term, what if the Senate goes Republican? I said, doesn't it seem strange to you that Obama sanctioned the Fuck Israel in General and Bibi in Particular just a week before the mid-term and seems to be trying to sabotage any Democratic hopes of maintaining the Senate on purpose? Jeff, said Laura, stop. Who benefits, I said, nodding at Hillary Inevitability on a wide-screen feed of the speech she was giving that very moment at Illhoptay as we were having coffee. She wants to run against a dysfunctional House and Senate run by the very Rightwing demagogues that will drive Democratic voters in buckets in 2016. Jeff, laughed Laura, stop. Does he believe this, Laura's friend asked Laura. I said, you don't think parties concede upcoming minor elections to set up better terms for winning the next major election? I said, out loud, Jeff, stop. It's an old routine, I said. When I point to a landmark for the more frequent Dark, yes, I can truthfully point to the motherfucking poachers, but yesterday, conversing with a stranger while Hillary Inevitability yapped in closed caption on a wide-screen above the stranger's head, the full force of how much I miss D, miss L, I miss K, miss Thursday Night Pints walloped me. I miss free-form yapping with people who yap my yap. I miss writing Thursday Night Pints posts. I never realized how much, all of it. I said, Robert Pollard's birthday is tomorrow. Laura's friend looked at me. Guided by Voices, I said. Stared at me. Lynn and I are going hiking tomorrow, I said.








I AM BUT A TRAVELER IN THIS LAND & KNOW LITTLE OF ITS WAYS

Dean Young

Is everything a field of energy caused

by human projection? From the crib bars

hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed   

desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts

surrounds the soccer field of what if.

Sometimes it seems like a world where no one   

knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes   

both directions. How about a polymer

that contracts in response to electrical

charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor?   

King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone

who has traveled here knows the discrepancies

between idea and fact. The idea is the worm   

in the tequila and the next day is the fact.   

In between may be the sacred—real blood   

from the wooden virgin’s eyes, and the hoax—

landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas

are best sprung from actions like the children   

of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette,   

another nightmares and SUVs. There’s considerable

wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams,   

waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened   

nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head:   

good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea.

The stranded whale, guided out of the cove   

by tugboats, turns and swims back in.   

The violinist will not let go her violin   

which is 200 years old and still on the train

thus she is dragged down the track. By what

manner is the soul joined to the body?   

Answer: an arm connecting a violin

to a violinist. According to Freud,

there are no accidents. Astrologists

and Presbyterians agree for different reasons.   

You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake.   

You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop.

Human consciousness: is it the projector

or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits   

and spray the grass so everything dies

but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka

what he thinks. Sometimes they give you   

a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest   

is your problem. In one version,

the beggar turns out to be a king and grants

the poor couple a castle and a moat and two   

silver horses said to be sired by the wind.

That was before dentistry, which might have been   

a better gift. You did not want to get sick   

in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries.

So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided

but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master   

of the short story. After the kiss from whom   

he will never know, the lieutenant, going home,

touches a bush in which birds are singing.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

• The toe I fucked up two months ago tomorrow? finally dropped its nail last night.
• An End to Empire. I confess, that link and this sentence and the link directly below this bullet which I read last night is the totality of thought I've spent on today's Scotland independence vote. 
• England, Scotland, and hegemonic states. 
• Since the cease fire between Israel and Hamas on August 26 Israel has:

1. Annexed another 1500 acres of West Bank land

2. Seized $56 million of PA tax revenue
3. Not lifted the illegal blockade (as required by the ceasefire)

4. Broken the ceasefire by firing at fishermen on four separate occasions
5. Detained six fishermen
6. Killed a 22-year-old, Issa al Qatari, a week before his wedding

7. Killed 16-year-old Mohammed Sinokrot with a rubber bullet to the head

8. Tortured a prisoner to the point of hospitalisation

9. Refused 13 members of the European Parliament entry into Gaza
10. Detained at least 127 people across the West Bank, including a seven-year-old boy in Hebron and two children, aged seven and eight, taken from the courtyard of their house in Silwad – and tear-gassed their mother

11. Continued to hold 33 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council in prison

12. Continued to hold 500 prisoners in administrative detention without charge or trial

13. Destroyed Bedouin homes in Khan al Ahmar, near Jerusalem, leaving 14 people homeless, and unveiled a plan to forcibly move thousands of Bedouin away from Jerusalem into two purpose-built townships

14. Destroyed a dairy factory in Hebron whose profits supported an orphanage

15. Destroyed a family home in Silwan, making five children homeless

16. Destroyed a house in Jerusalem where aid supplies en route to Gaza were being stored
17. Destroyed a well near Hebron

18. Set fire to an olive grove near Hebron

19. Raided a health centre and a nursery school in Nablus, causing extensive damage

20. Destroyed a swathe of farmland in Rafah by driving tanks over it

21. Ordered the dismantling of a small monument in Jerusalem to Mohamed Abu Khdeir, murdered in July by an Israeli lynch mob
22. Continued building a vast tunnel network under Jerusalem

23. Stormed the al Aqsa mosque compound with a group of far right settlers
24. Assisted hundreds of settlers in storming Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus

25. Prevented students from entering al Quds University, firing stun grenades and rubber bullets at those who tried to go in

26. Earned unknown millions on reconstruction materials for Gaza, where 100,000 people need their destroyed homes rebuilt. The total bill is estimated at $7.8 billion

• As far as I know the residents of Augusta have yet to set a vote on leaving Maryland.
• Yes, I tweeted that I could build a post around removing Demuth's #5 as background not mostly because William Carlos Williams' birthday was yesterday but because I am #6 and few would get the allusion and if they did they wouldn't find it as funny as me. I didn't add in tweet that fine metaphors abound.
• We go to the gallery (h/t) via (h/t).
• no, i do not accept your frigging u2 album...

• Yes, K, everyone has made the "I'm 26th again, fuck you McArthur Foundation" joke. 
• L says I should keep going but faster, dammit.
• Thank you, L, thank you K. There may, there's an email flurry, there's the slightest almost infinitesimal chance, a Whatever Fucking Night It Can Be Arranged Pints in November. Please please please please please.
• Those were my favorite posts to write, these bullets will be the last one since I love you both.
• Please please please please please, may it happen, I can't imagine ever writing about it again after this post. L, K, see?
• If we get together again twice a year for the next ten years, this is it here.
• But yes. I'm trying. Thank you. Fuck it. Got it.
• Have I ever mentioned how much I love Fucked Up?

TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD

Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

Wisteria, Extreme

The penultimate day of the birthdayiest month in Egoslavia. Pauline Oliveros is eighty-two today.

Saturday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, I said at Thursday Night Pints, certainly the last Thursday Night Pints for the summer, probably the last forever though we promised ourselves at least one more. We've already lost D, rest in peace. K has offers in Ann Arbor and Palo Alto, will take one or the other, will be out of town much of the summer. L has grandchildren in Atlanta, stupidly lucrative house-flipper offers for her house in Arlington, will be out of town much of the summer. I'd take the Palo Alto offer, I said to K. I said to L, I'd take the stupidly lucrative money and buy a single floor condo near your grandchildren instead of living alone with two bad hips in a 1940s Cape Cod with three floors and narrow and steep stairs. I was agreeing with the choices they've already made. I can't imagine going to Atlanta for any reason, I can totally imagine going to Northern California, I'll have places to stay in either case.

That's the Thursday Night Pints bleggal pre-eulogy, eulogy, and post-eulogy. Combined with else and tomorrow's High Egoslavian Holy Day fine metaphors abound, or could or might or will.







UPDATE!

• I wasn't going to post links today but I may not post links tomorrow and these will go stale soon.
• The return of Fuck You Friday.
• Monster capitalism and the complicit state.
• Privatizing profits, socializing losses.
• On the urgent necessity of anti-imperialism.
• The anxieties of big data.
• Daniel Ellsberg on the odious John Kerry. This is true: on election day POTUS 2004 I went door to door in Harrisburg Pennsylvania canvassing votes of John Kerry.
• Those who own the goal posts.
• Silber sends a brief update. Please, if you can spar the coins in your pocket consider giving them to Arthur.
• Ten words used only in Irish English.
• Walter Benjamin, for those of you who do.
• On location: Place and placelessness; conflicting histories and transmuted genre; mythologized frontiers and one notion of “the West” blurring into a socio-historic another, somewhere just beyond the usual reach of cinematic allegory and metaphor...
• Charles Simic remembers Russell Edson (whose poetry I barely know) and Bill Knott (whose poetry I love).
• The legacy of William Meredith, who I used to read but don't think about any more (which says more about me than the poetry of William Meredith).

EXTREME WISTERIA

Lucie Brock-Broido

On abandon, uncalled for but called forth.

                                                                              The hydrangea

Of   her crushed each year a little more into the attar of   herself.

Pallid. Injured, wildly capable.

A throat to come home to, tupelo.

                                                Lemurs in parlors, inconsolable.

Parlors of burgundy and sleigh. Unseverable fear.

Wistful, woke most every afternoon

                                In the green rooms of the Abandonarium.

                                                Beautiful cage, asylum in.

Reckless urges to climb celestial trellises that may or may not

                                 Have been there.

So few wild raspberries, they were countable,

                                 Triaged out by hand.

Ten-thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Intimacy with others,

                                 Sateen. Extreme hyacinth as evidence.

Her single subject the idea that every single thing she loves

                                 Will (perhaps tomorrow) die.

High editorial illusion of   “Control.” Early childhood: measles,

                                                                              Scarlet fevers;

Cleopatra for most masquerades, gold sandals, broken home.

Convinced Gould’s late last recording of the Goldberg Variations

Was put down just for her. Unusual coalition of early deaths.

Early middle deaths as well. Believed, despite all evidence,

In afterlife, looked hopelessly for corroborating evidence of   such.

                                                                                          Wisteria, extreme.

There was always the murmur, you remember, about going home.

IF A GARDEN OF NUMBERS

Cole Swensen

If a garden is the world counted

                                                           and found analogue in nature

One does not become two by ever ending

                                                                           so the stairs must be uneven in number

and not exceed

thirteen without a pause

of two paces’ width, which

                                                 for instance, the golden section

                            mitigates between abandon

and an orchestra just behind those trees,

gradations of green that take a stethoscope: we risk:

Length over width

                                  to make the horizon run straight

equals

            to make the pond an oval:

                                                            Width

                                                            over length minus the width

                              in which descending circles curl

into animals exact as a remainder.

                              Which means excess. The meaning of the real

always exceeds that of the ideal, said someone.

                                                                                      He was speaking of Vaux-le-Vicomte,

but it’s equally true of parking, or hunting, or wishing you could take it back. He

                              who is Allen Weiss, actually said, “The meaning

of a plastic or pictorial construct always surpasses the ideal meaning of that work.”

Which is something else entirely. Said

the axonometric

divided by

the anamorphic.

                               There is nothing that controls our thoughts

more than what we think we see,

which we label “we.”

Born Eighty-Four Years Ago Today

Stanley Elkin, one of my Deserted Island Five even though I don't play Deserted Island Five with novelists and poets. These are the two excerpts I always use for his birthday, the first capturing one of Elkins's great themes, the second simply the most beautiful, heartbreaking paragraph, as stand alone but especially within the context of the novel, I've ever read:

Ben, everything there is is against your being here! Think of get-togethers, family stuff, golden anniversaries in rented halls, fire regulation celebrated more in the breach than the observance, the baked Alaska up in flames, everybody wiped out - all the cousins in from coasts, wiped out. Rare, yes - who says not - certainly rare, but it could happen, has happened. And once is enough if you've been invited. All the people picked off by plagues and folks eaten by earthquakes and drowned in the tidal waves, all the people already dead that you might have been or who might have begat the girl who married the guy who fathered the fellow who might have been your ancestor - all the showers of sperm that dried on his Kleenex or spilled on his sheets or fell on the ground or dirtied his hands when he jerked off or came in his p.j.'s or no, maybe he was actually screwing and the spermatozoon had your number written on it and it was lost at sea because that's what happens, you see - there's low motility and torn tails - that's what happens to all but a handful out of all the googols and gallons of come, more sperm finally than even the grains of sand I was talking about, more even than the degrees. Well - am I making the picture for you? Am I connecting the dots? Ben, Ben, Nick the Greek wouldn't lay a fart against a trillion bucks that you'd ever make it to this planet!

   
- The Franchiser

And it was wondrous in the negligible humidity how they gawked across the perfect air, how, stunned by the helices and all the parabolas of grace, they gasped, they sighed, these short-timers who even at their age could not buy insurance at any price, not even if the premiums were paid in the rare rich elements, in pearls clustered as grapes, in buckets of bullion, in trellises of diamonds, how, glad to be alive, they stared at each other and caught their breath.

 - Magic Kingdom 


Here's an interview from 1976. I reread Dick Gibson Show and the triptych novellas Searches and Seizures between last year's birthday and this year's. I wrote a Masters thesis on Elkin in 1996-97, going back to the novels since, while still an exhilarating and unique again experience, felt like chapters were due to D in the morning - quick, scan novels for highlights, my margin scrawls, scavenge my notebooks a seventh time before pounding out paragraphs before the morning. But this year I read Searches and Seizures, my favorite Elkin triptych of his three triptychs of novellas (and he loved novellas best), after D died this past Fall, D who loved Elkin too but loved "The Bailbondsman," the first of the three in Searches and Seizures, best. Reading Elkin last December didn't feel like research. Thursday Night Pints started when D was Head Signature on my Masters thesis on Stanley Elkin. Rest in Peace, D. Scheduled for the next year, Mrs Ted Bliss and Van Gogh's Room at Arles, respectively Elkin's last novel and last triptych of novellas.

Let me know if I can turn you on.

When I Get on My Knees and Lick Her Hand She Screams

    
For the first time in months a Thursday night Thursday Night Pints. We talked about Napoleon and rabies. The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that the cat that bit Napoleon had rabies are 100,000 to 1 and I know that even if the cat that bit Napoleon did have rabies the odds that rabies in Napoleon would have reached his salivary glands this soon are 1,000,000 to 1 and even if the rabies had reached his salivary glands he would either need to bite me or lick an open wound on me, which he hasn't, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, rabies. L said, why not just get the shots for peace of mind? I might, I said, as much for others' peace of mind as my own.





      

• Mark Ames vs Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman over USAID.
• K asked, so are you really going to reengage with the clusterfuck? We had been talking about how all the NSA/Snowden noise has ceased now that the noise's value to Power has accrued to Power (as I and probably everyone who reads this blog predicted). The mind is weird, I said. Every year during the first two weeks of pollen's return I get slight allergy symptoms - my nose gets stuffed while I sleep, I blow technicolor snot in the morning - while my body adjusts to pollen then returns to normal. I know this. It happens every year. And I know that the odds that any action I take has any effect other than a self-congratulatory moral boost is a trillion to one, but when I blew my technicolor snot into a paper towel this morning I thought, fuck, fucking fine metaphors abound.
• This week in water.
• For those following the Napoleon story: the Animal Control officer cancelled his Friday morning visit to the house. I'm going to drive out to the new Animal Control headquarters in Redland (where Kobin Rlippel grew up, or One of Four in her Borglandru designation) and get much needed information.
• Hand of doom.
• Blasting opera forward.
• Heinlein, for those of you who do.
• Mark Strand is eighty today.
• What does poetry do? or: Ashbery, for those of you who do.
• Yes, I deleted last night's Ashbery post and post the youtube here:

EATING POETRY

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Disdaining Age, Ignoring Pain, Avoiding Mirrors

 
What never got mentioned at Tuesday Night Pints: Democrats, Republicans, Barack Obama, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, the Midterm Elections; Hillary Clinton and Hillarian Inevitability, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley, Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, POTUS 16; Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Dianne Feinstein, the NSA, the panopticon state, the police state, the surveillance state; Glenn Greenwald, people who love Greenwald, people who hate Greenwald, people who loved Greenwald but now hate Greenwald, people who hated Greenwald but now love Greenwald, Greenwald as avatar of zeitgeist; the Koch Brothers, Pierre Omidyar, Ken Langone, Bill Gates, or any other oligarch; Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Crimea; Hilltop, Hilltop politics, Hilltop president, Hilltop provost, Hilltop English Department, the plan to add a PhD to Hilltop English Department, professors in English Department, English Department chair; blegging, bleggal theory, bleggal compulsion, bleggal interventions, bleggal hiatus, furious and futile blegging in a dying Blegsylvania, dying Blegsylvania. None of these were mentioned, not by design but by natural flow of conversation. They never came up. It was only driving home that I thought about it. I've theories what it signifies, some positive, some negative: my nagging sense of responsibility for bitching about what I can't change is both alarmed and relieved. I'm giving up, I'm smartening up. A good time was had.

• Number Six was born eighty-six years ago today.
• Finding new ways to hide in plain sight: It’s strange, then, that after decades of moving toward an ever more conspicuous readability of the self, to mark out in dress and style and dialect who we are, that we’re witnessing a turn to obfuscation as a mode of individualism; this is the very trend lying behind the much-discussed idea of normcore. Outlined in a clever, insightful essay by Fiona Duncan in New York Magazine, normcore is ostensibly a shift in fashion toward a kind of deliberate blankness, one that recognizes either the increasing impossibility of true uniqueness, or that one might not be read by others at all. No ostentatious individualism for the normcore faithful, but, rather, a decided shift toward the camouflage of appearing to be ordinary.
• The gravest threat of totalitarianism.
• Bringing light. A friend writes about a friend.
• UPDATE! Frances had to pull the above on the advice of her friend's lawyer. She hopes it will be live again soon.
• Derelict ship on an asphalt sea.
• Three days late, New Inquiry's Sunday Reads.
• Food links.
• Ranciere, for those of you who do: Returning to so many early influences has again reminded me to thrive in partiality. Like a good mentor, I have been prompted not to be a vampire, to not be a tourist, to make the first maneuver toward originality by looping back around and returning to where I departed, reexamining the point of origin and all the detritus that litters and hides it from me. Not to relearn what has been forgotten, but to forget what has been learned. To search deteriorated notions and oppressed positions. These microscopic transgressions form the phenomenal ground of varied arts that help me live. The message has been a relief: adhere to the indeterminate in all of us. Go small, go slow, go weird and unknown, and you won’t have to worry about being interesting.
• Two words.
• Brad reads Ammons, as in out loud (as all poetry should be read).
• Listen to Ashbery read one of his poems.
• Jason Molina died a year ago. Have some songs.
• Prunella has Husker Du (Hart songs) and Lush for you.

PARENT'S PANTOUM

Carolyn Kizer

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

Birdsong, Face It, Some Male Machine Gone Addled - Repeat, Repeat - the Damage Keeps Doing, the World Ending Then Starting, the First Word, the Last, Etc.

• Birdsong today and then I'll keep Messiaen to myself until next time I don't.
• Prunella sends a clarification: she didn't receive the email, a colleague did. My apologies. The story has gone national, read more here.
• What's the point if we can't have fun? Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.
• Synecdochly embedded seppuku.
• You take the low road and I'll take the low road.
• RIP, Stuart Hall.
• Two Stuart Hall essays on neoliberalism.
• UPDATE! Lots more on Hall and lots of links.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.

• Bleggalgazing. I don't think the Kate Bush allusion was intended (I hope I'm wrong) that has put Hounds of Love - the album, not just the song alluded to - on permanent replay today in my head. It's a good thing.
• Bleggalgazing - over the next few days I'm going to move more blogs that haven't updated in at least two months to Moribund: if and when the owner does blog again I want to be sure to see it, something easier to notice in Moribund than in the more active blogrolls. As always, unless the owner has killed the blog itself, no one is purged.
• Beatallica.
• People still care. Tom Clark's latest.
• [I] [Lied]. I'm surprised you're promoting it, said L last night at Sunday Night Pints, though I approve. Thank you, I said. I like what you sent me, said K. Thank you, I said. Are you going to point out what you're doing, L asked. Nope, I said. And that's today's Sunday Night Pints monologue, I love you, but much of what we talked about is none of your business.
• UPDATE! [I] [Lied] dead. [I] [Lied] [Dog] lives.
• The thousand somethings of someone.
• RIP, Maxine Kumin.
• More.
• Something that stutters sincerely: In the work of Hart, Lin, and others, I will argue, this deliberate embrace of failure is worked out through an explicit departure from an allegedly exhausted aesthetic and a movement toward a renewed emphasis on emotion. This ends up looking like a testing of the grounds between, on the one hand, the sincere or expressive, and on the other, the ironic or unemotional. The form this relation takes, though, depends upon thinking about postmodernism as representative of modes of discourse which thrive on techniques like parody and pastiche, on aesthetic distance and heightened self-consciousness through a variety of methods (recycling of old forms, appropriation, collage). hough postmodern art is obviously far more complex and diverse than the above characterization acknowledges, poets like Hart and Lin seem to see postmodernist poetics as having reached its limit, and are now in a position to critique its methods through (ironically) oscillating between an embrace and rejection of such techniques.

BIRDSONG, FACE IT, SOME MALE MACHINE

Marianne Boruch

Birdsong, face it, some male machine   

gone addled—repeat, repeat—the damage

keeps doing, the world ending then starting,

the first word the last, etc. It's that   

etcetera. How to love. Is a wire   

just loose? Build an ear for that. Fewer, they say.   

So many fewer, by far. He's showing off   

to call her back. Or claiming the tree.   

Or a complaint—the food around here,   

the ants, the moths, the berries. She's making   

the nest, or both are. In feathers, in hair or twigs,   

in rootlets and tin foil. Shiny bits seen

from a distance, a mistake. But fate   

has reasons to dress up. Stupid   

and dazzling have a place, a place, a place   

though never. She can't sing it.

Here's a Guess: We Will Sit on a Wooden Lawn-Chair in the Sun, and We Will Like It

Do people click all the links? Do they listen to all the songs? K asked me Saturday night at a Saturday Night Edition of Thursday Night Pints. I know, I said, some regularly do, most don't though I'd guess more click through to the links than listen to the music, I have one good friend who tells me he never listens to the music. L said, depends on the music for me, the experimental music, fuck that. That ended this week's questions about this blog. Minor wonderment at obamaclusterfuck that handed the GOP a lifeline after the GOP had its ass clocked in kabukifuck re: Obama's incompetence: real, fake, death to the Either/Or. L said, I've never seen incompetence so competently executed, it must be by design. Design, I said, as in Battling Tops. Huh? said K. He's old, said L. More music you don't like Sunday, I said to L, you'll like Monday's.

• And she will.
• The business of free speech: Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from the consequences of speech. Freedom of speech is not a protection against people telling you that your views are hateful. Freedom of speech doesn’t oblige other people or organizations to support you in your privileged position as a broadcaster, or journalist, or blogger. Freedom of speech isn’t a guarantee of permanent employment when the thing you are selling is your opinion, nor does freedom of speech compel the public to buy said opinion from you.
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• A pandemonium of word demons.
• The staying away.
• Emotional.
• The NYT obit for Lessing. She was someone who I always liked what she was saying better than I liked the way she said it.
• List of Lessing links.
• Bump: I've still three tickets to Bonnie Prince Billy in Annapolis on Thursday that I cannot use and the YOU CAN HAVE FOR FREE.
• Iva Bittova documentary.
• Feldman and Beckett (yes, again) for those of you who do.

IN A LANDSCAPE: IV

John Gallaher

Now the scene changes, we say, and the next few years 

are quiet. It's another curse, the inverse of the "interesting times" 

the Chinese were said to go on so about. Nevertheless, there it is, 

as the emptiness needs a something in order to be defined as empty, 

which means we spend the next few years talking about other years, 

as if that's what's important. Maybe that is what's important. It was terrible, 

the hospital stay. The children. Not the children in the abstract way, 

but those times worried that this would go wrong, or that, and then things 

do go wrong and it almost feels like we'd wished for it to happen, 

so not only do we have to go through this terrible time, but we also 

have to keep reminding ourselves that we didn't wish for it. It's Problem 

One. And there's our two-year-old son strapped to a board with an IV, crying. 

And doesn't it feel like a formal device then? As if expecting it 

were the same--or is the same--as willing it, but then almost willing it anyway, 

saying something like, "Please God, or whomever, get it over with already . . ." 

if the world isn't going to be a museum only, as museums keep calling out 

that there's so much more to find in the past, like ourselves, for instance. 

The simplification of our forms. The question of why it might be important 

to save our dinnerware, or Yo-yos. We have these accidents 

in common: last night I was pulling a filing cabinet upstairs on a hand truck, 

and at the 90 degree turn it fell on top of me and I had to hold it like that, 

one wheel on the stair, one in mid-air. So I had some time on my hands, 

waiting for Robin to get home. They say that if you relax, lying there 

is 80% as restful as sleep. And knowing how to relax is key, they say. 

Here's a guess: we will sit on a wooden lawn-chair in the sun, and we 

will like it. We will run the numbers and think it sounds like a good 

proposition. We will consult a map, even ask directions. The sun's 

out right now, in fact, and it's all a matter of doing the next big thing. 

Driving home, say. And then it's a manner of having done something. 

Driving past the car wash. Yes, forcing a matter of doing the next 

thing, which is filling out the accident report, while the old man 

who hit my pickup is crying in the street. And then I'm walking around, 

picking up the fender and light pieces and putting them in the bed.

From the Green Country You Reconstruct in Your Brain, from the Rubble and Stink of Your Occupation, There Is No Moving Out

Are liberals stupid? K said as she read the title of this blog post on her tablet at Thursday Night Pints. That's the first sentence I'm going to type for the post, I said, capture the hypocrisy and irony of three well-off upper middle class white people bemoaning the state of progressivism in America on our digital devices while drinking designer beer and single malt scotches. My son, said L, tells me to go live a teepee and crap in a pit when I bitch about Democrats. It's like being told America, love it or leave it when I was protesting Vietnam in the early 70s. When I managed Crown Books stores in the early/mid 80s, I said after we each gave today's version of the same conversation regarding the Less-Shitty Problem updated for topicality, we sold Harlequin romances that literally were the same book over and over - the publisher's salesmen showed me - nouns blanks to be filled in for next months' editions, each book ending on the same page at the same place. They even had a formula, I said the salesman said, if the location was San Francisco the heroine's name was Kate, if the heroine's name was Francesca the location was London. K's phone rang, L made a phone call, I bought a round. Hilltop crosstalk for a small bit, real life for a bigger bit. We miss you, D. Then a return upon leaving to the Less-Shitty Problem, it's irresoluteness, for all the ________ of my opinions, all the _______ of yours. Write this sentence, said L: peggy pegs peg blanks with pegs.

• Jesse put that Lindsey Buckingham song in my head yesterday, immediate cascade sparked.
• Hamster, do you remember the name of the Random House sales rep? He was the Harlequin guy?
• Do you remember the name of the grey-haired hippie woman who was spooky sexy/unsexy, I think she was the Dell sales rep?
• For the record, L was calling us pegs.
• The time and space of contemporary war.
• Snowden: when China helped the US?
• The criminal NSA.
• The service of Snowden.
• Ex-con.
• Triskelions.
• Biggest Triskelion scandal yet?
• Triskelions and free speech.
• Triskelions and the profits of a police state.
• We, the Corporations?

UPDATE! 

PERE UBU PLAYING DC SEPTEMBER 10th!

Who's in? Just bought six tickets, Earthgirl and me, Richard, Mr Alarum, Hamster already in, who else? I can get more tickets.

• UPDATE! And they may be coming to a town near you too!
• You will jog for the master race.
• The perils of Paula Deen.
• No one who has ever dealt with any flavor of DC area Park Police will find this story surprising.
• Proverbial details.
• nighthawk.
• 80s indie pop remembered.
• WOWEE! Prunella just sent me news that Pere Ubu is playing Columbus, an hour's drive from Bamgier, in September. FIELD TRIP? 
• Forgive me, I love Lindsey Buckingham's music.

APPARITION OF THE EXILE

Bruce Weigl

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended.

From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.