The Accuracy to Detail I've Imposed on My Artistic Freedom in New Table Requried I Obtain a Pencil

Tabletnacle Choirless

Pretend I've Dropped the Subject

Transcription someplace else, if you want to you can find it. Linkless, monologue-less today, finished that and read last night. Seeing Lambchop and Yo La Tengo tonight, selfish, complicit bastard that I am, but not until after trying a new Ethiopian restaurant, story, photos, maybe, tomorrow.








CROSSROADS IN THE PAST

John Ashbery

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do

when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.

Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.

No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know

exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?

I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone

with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel

with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.

We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,

talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know

that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.

I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some

sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards

drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves

sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly

crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully

know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly

amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in. 

Every Idea I Have Is Nostalgia

And with that I complete the second half of a goading (though payment won't be until at least next week), plus provide a detailed account and and review, with observations and bleggal theorizing, on yesterday's mass migration of sites moribund on live blogrolls to moribund on the new blogroll called Moribund (the burgermeister).  I cheated - two of the three sub-poems were already written. I am again reminded that I don't do Fuck-It well, my first instinct as always to immediately apply rules to anything supposedly ruleless, the defining and applying of rules more fun than playing without them.

• Was reminded of Jessica Bailiff last night on Mandl's show.
• Zing! The Bayern Munich coach Pep Guardiola had little time to celebrate his team's 3-0 league win at Borussia Dortmund on Saturday, threatening instead to uncover a mole he said has been leaking team details to the media. "It does not matter who it is, heads will roll," Guardiola was quoted in the Bild newspaper as having told his players after the game, angry that tactics had made their way into the press before the game. "I will throw him out. He will not play under me again." The club's chief executive Karl-Heinz Rummenigge confirmed the existence of a mole, saying he should stop or face action from the club. "We will obviously not bring in the NSA [National Security Agency] to find out who it is," Rummenigge told Sky television. "But I advise him to stop doing it or he will have a serious problem not only with Pep Guardiola, but also the entire club."
• How advertising turned anti-consumerism into a secret weapon.
• Women's justice in New Mexico.
• The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• I have no idea why this would be, but since moving the moribund to their own locale the blog seems to be loading much faster.
• Szybist interview: I experiment a lot. Sometimes I allow poems to work toward their form; sometimes I begin with form to provide what Lyn Hejinian describes as an intentional ‘field of inquiry’ in which to improvise. For me, to write a poem is to experiment with form, or experiment with how different limitations provoke different kinds of language, different imaginations. 
• Requiem for a wood sprite.
• Chrostowska? Good thing I have access to a university library.
• Happy Birthday, Prunella! Her latest playlist has the guy with whom she shares a birthday. I confess I don't know as much about Mark Lanegan's music as I should, and who the hell does birthdays on blog anyway?

THE TROUBADOURS ETC

Mary Szybist

Just for this evening, let's not mock them.

Not their curtsies or cross-garters

or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens

promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads

through metal contraptions to eat.

We've followed West 84, and what else?

Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,

lounging sheep, telephone wires,

yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,

the violet underneath of clouds.

Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:

there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—

darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound

with the thunder of their wings.

After a while, it must have seemed that they followed

not instinct or pattern but only

one another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,

they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers.

And when we stop we'll follow—what?

Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love

only through miracle,

but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,

how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.

The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.

Think of me in the garden, humming

quietly to myself in my blue dress,

a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,

though cloudless.

At what point is something gone completely?

The last of the sunlight is disappearing

even as it swells—

Just for this evening, won't you put me before you

until I'm far enough away you can

believe in me?

Then try, try to come closer—

my wonderful and less than.

Watchable but Not Worth Watching

The Moxy of a Junior Vampire

• New Sebadoh. Time to go back and listen to old Sebadoh. Cats and tablets, who the fuck does cats and tablets?
• So, a mass shooting, this time three miles from the cubicle in which I was sitting at the time. Snore, this will be forgotten by Thursday, just another day in America. Re: our conditioning - more and more, nature claws back turf gained by nurture.
• Dr Rosen and the Snowden Effect.
• On the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.
• Yapping at front desk today, econ professor says Summers jumped, govt professor says he was pushed. There's a Richard Thompson song that gets played here at this point every time.
• Two blogfriends attended Oberlin - either of you there when Dan Bodah was there? More importantly, Dan had a live set from Richard Younges on his show last night. By the way, for our next field trip in Ohio Planet has asked to drive to Oberlin to revisit for fuck's sake and then up to Vermilion for dinner at one of the best restaurants we ate in on the college visits and that I can see exactly where it is and what it looks like in my mind but fuck if I can remember the name and fuck if I'm doing research.
• Hell goes round and round.
• The grumpy publisher.
• There is a William Carlos Williams cascade in your afternoon's future.

CAPITALISM

Nyla Matuk

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
—Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”

Three hundred times as heavy as our sun.
The Bubble Observer scientists report
buzzing and whizzing and gesturing in a ball
of swollen crimson gas burning standing
like a braintrust of firebrands and cake batter.

See the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
for updates, they say. This gubbinal—R136a1—sits around the house,
a rich tanned coot at the corner of Magellanic Cloud
and Shalimar’s Dowry, 165,000 light years in mystery
beyond the Milky Way.

The CN Tower casts its ex-cathedra shadow by day,
recently suited with LED lights, red and purple.
With the moxy of a junior vampire,
they stroke the shaft with abandon;
that is, aggregating the infrared of the city

and taking possession even as markets drain
the sweet sad drainage of abandoned wives.
A motive pure as sunrise, sure as sunset.
Watch the flick of green and greedy gold on a deerfly:
a glittering buzz we still don’t understand.

The Semi-Lust of Intentional Indifference

There was a time when every post on this blog had a Fleabus photo. Here's an article about Maryland Tea Partiers wanting western Maryland to secede from Maryland. I can think of six primary and dozens of secondary snarkassholistic responses (including, wearily, this one) to bump the story, but fuck that. As Mr Abonilox told me last night as we discussed our respective cases of damnlessness, the "new zeitgeist is mental exhaustion resulting in passive acceptance of the fucked-uppedness of everything." And yes, as Jim noted yesterday in comments, "This doesn't feel like the standard aarglebaargle©®. Feels like something's afoot: change?" Here? Yes, no, I don't know. Earthgirl and Planet and me are fine, and these are the hardest weeks of work of the year and they always beat the fuck out of my mood, but here, and by extension the urge to wear colors and waive flags and participate in rituals like the indoctrinated bee I am? Yes, no, I don't know. I know I'm trying to write about it, so far twenty or so rejected first drafts. I tried link-farming last night - it's the links that drive the traffic here, the angrier and clusterfuckier the links the greater the traffic - but that sucked so I decided to write about why greater traffic here means something to me though suddenly, surprisingly, not so much, decided fuck that too, read 150 pages of Coover's Origin of the Brunists which I'm rereading in anticipation of the release of the sequel, best, most focused novel-reading in what seems like years. I put the book down when my eyes insisted, thought about writing about reading well, thought fuck that too. Strange days. More later, or not. Will I write about things tonight? Nope! tonight with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard I'm seeing Pere Ubu, and while I'm not as excited as once I would have been I still have a pulse so at least I know my case of damnlessness isn't thoroughly comprehensive.






THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had   

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,   

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,   

even the hardness,   

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,   

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,   

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,   

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

Electricity and Most of Us Aren't Electricity

Their Bells Call Back to Their Burdened Hearts the Way a Sparrow Taunts an Old Hawk

• More John Cage for his 101 birthday yesterday.
• The next revelation. I am sympathetic to the point of not taking sides that (a) there is something disturbingly gatekeeping and proprietorial (and echoes the behavior of those being exposed) in dripping the leaks and (b) there is value in keeping the story front page as long as possible in an information economy where last week's OH MY FUCKING GODs disappear into the next OH MY FUCKING GOD with daily regularity.
• Encryption: the sky IS falling.
• The most frightening revelation yet?
• UPDATE! I am the other.
• Yes yes yes, of course you and me assumed this was happening. The reyodeling: the value of these revelations isn't in what's revealed, it's in the reaction of the Empire and its keepers to the revelations.
• Five ways to stay safe?
• I bet you pints that the surprise of Obama's War isn't how wussy it is, it's how kiss my motherfucking American ass robust it is.
• I know, I know, metrics. Measure the .06% more shitty, baseline the less shitty, I'm told.
• Propaganda Alert!
• Pastor Sanctimonious, man of Christ, desperately wants to kill Syrians, hearts Obama.
• UPDATE! The United States government, when push comes to shove, wants Assad or someone very much like him to rule over Syria. A distain or contempt for public opinion across the Middle East is the underlying reason why there has long been a bi-partisan consensus in support of military rule in Egypt, in support of the violent repression of the people of Bahrain, in support of the extreme fundamentalists who have long miss-ruled Saudi Arabia, and in support of a policy of relentless hostility directed towards Iran. Worse of all, from the perspective of the Washington establishment, Assad fully understands the situation and the leverage that it inadvertently grants him. This was the reason that Assad demonstrated his contempt for President Obama’s implied threat of a “Red Line” by deploying lethal gas. The Administration is especially angry because in their hearts they already know that they are going to let Assad get away with it.
• Joyce Carol Oates asks the same question I asked yesterday.
• Grayson calls his shot.
• Majority of Americans approve of sending Congress to Syria.

• This week in water.
• Purple Line. While I heartily say Fuck the Columbia Country Club! I am sympathetic to those who'd have trains they never bargained for in their backyard. They needn't worry - it will never be built.
• The three of you I promised copies of Fathers and Crows, my apologies, I set them aside then got busy, mailing them today.
• Crow answered my request that he confirm his existence.
• Dear K, I never said I wouldn't (haven't) write (written) a history of Stringtown, I wrote in an email yesterday as we were postponing last night's Thursday Night Pints to next week, the start of the semester making doing it last night feel more like duty than a pleasure. I've said I'm not going to post it here, or rather, not going to post it here in more detail than I already do.
• Is fucking Helmetball season over yet?
• Quality, schmality
• Pynchonicity.
• Libraries and eBooks.
• Faulkner, for those of you who do.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Obscure Sound's Best of August.
• Roxy Music live 1976.

FOUR QUESTIONS REGARDING THE DREAMS OF ANIMALS

Susan Stewart

1. Is it true that they dream?

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

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

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

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

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

4. How can we learn more?

    This is all we will ever know.

I Should Resist This Degrading Donkey-Work in Favor of My Own Writing Wherein Contentment Surely Lies

Planet went bowling this past weekend, sent me the above photo of a bowling ball spotted and immediately photographed. It's been added to Blogroll Right and I posted it a few nights ago for an overnight post to her, thought I'd add it in this post so it's in the permanent archives, plus these are my hell weeks at work, the three weeks a year (this is the middle week) when I don't trust my fury's targeting (I mean more than usual) and express frustrated fury in sentences like this one as a result, and me as bowling ball serves as apt and fortunately timed gag.

• Blogbud went Minnie Riperton on twitter yesterday, I mentioned she's been getting a lot of airplay on WFMU recently. I once loved someone who loved Minnie Riperton. I said give me a playlist, I'll cascade it, add some I find.
• I promise, Lovin' You is not in this blog post.
• These three weeks do provide intense why the fuck am I doing this bleggalgazing (I mean more than usual) in tablets, some will appear here and there eventually, or not.
• On anxiety.
• Philosophy for the weak.
• Angry
• Syria/
• obamapostasy/
• motherfucking Democrats
• links
• deleted.
• UPDATE! I gave hundreds of dollars and donated countless hours in 2004, including canvassing Harrisburg PA in the weekends before and on election day, for John "Syria 2013 is Munich 1938" Kerry. I'm well aware who the dumb motherfucker is here. 
• The Way.
• Will a DC United stadium be worth it?
• Krasznahorkei, for those of you who do.
• The Blue Bowl.
• Silliman's generous litlinks.
• Copy/pasting the physical world.
• Nobel lit odds. Adonis?
• Harold Budd collected and reissued.
• New Lydia Davis story.
• Only when I'm dreaming.
• Completeness.
• I am the black gold of the sun.
• There is a Julia Holter cascade in your future.

AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Simon Armitage

Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English

about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks.

To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug,

Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice.

True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly

in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s

      Hound,”

but beyond that — silence.

I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own

      writing,

wherein contentment surely lies.

But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound

      note,

and when my bank manager guffaws,

small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower

through the infinity of dark space

between his world and mine.

I'm Selling by Selling I'm

A twitter discussion last night between Richard and me on humans, their organizational drive and lack of organizational skills, the wonder we don't kill each other and the sad acknowledgment that this has been, is, and will be as good as humans get at any moment in our species' existence led to a discussion of our date a week from Tuesday in DC to see Pere Ubu. Earthgirl and Mr Alarum and Hamster are going too! Richard lives in Bawlmer Merlyn, asked if there was an opening act, starting to think about logistics, then discovered there is:




*



*





*


I'm curious. I can't wait. Who's the closing act?

For You Could Not, Could Never Fully Refute the Actual or Justify the Sad Heft of Your Body, Earn Your Rightful Space or Pay for the Parcels of Oxygen You Inherited

• Any questions about the mean pettiness of our overlords?
• UPDATE! Ladies and gentleman, meet the next great Greenwald smear-meme.
• How to create a dictatorship.
• Because they can.
• UPDATE! Four points.
• Andrew Sullivan nears his obamapostasy?
• UPDATE! Just to be clear, rhetorical question directly above.
• UPDATE! Atrios' obamapostasy will never be ready.
• UPDATE! Digby's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• UPDATE! Drum's obamapostasy will never be ready, though he does have a tiny epiphany.
• There is not one Democrat of national significance speaking out forcefully and confrontationally against Obama.
• UPDATE! Local v national.
• The ecstasy of capitulation.
• Snowden leaks: the real take-home?
• Patriot or traitor, the choice is yours?
• Strategizing the end of neoliberalism?

• Psychopathology of the drone.
• A nation of truthers.
• The ritual theater of progress.
• Beyond blame? Society of blame: a synopsis.
• Mr Abonilox recommends this Nagel column on The Core of Mind and Cosmos.
• What is realism?
• So yes, the bleg's rearrangement continues, as always in service to my reminding myself What the Fuck. A couple of the blogrolls have changed spots. Nobody has been deleted.
• Happy Birthday, Mumpsimus.
• Cannon Fodder, part one.
• Conversion table.

SUICIDE'S NOTE: AN ANNUAL

Mary Karr

I hope you’ve been taken up by Jesus

though so many decades have passed, so far apart we’d grown

     between love transmogrifying into hate and those sad letters

           and phone calls and your face vanishing into a noose that

I couldn’t

     today name the gods

           you at the end worshipped, if any, praise being

impossible for the devoutly miserable. And screw my church who’d

     roast in Hell poor suffering

           bastards like you, unable to bear the masks

of their own faces. With words you sought to shape

     a world alternate to the one that dared

           inscribe itself so ruthlessly across your eyes, for you

could not, could never

     fully refute the actual or justify the sad heft of your body, earn

           your rightful space or pay for the parcels of oxygen you

inherited. More than once you asked

     that I breathe into your lungs like the soprano in the opera

           I loved so my ghost might inhabit you and you ingest my belief

in your otherwise-only-probable soul. I wonder does your

     death feel like failure to everybody who ever

           loved you as if our collective cpr stopped

too soon, the defib paddles lost charge, the corpse

     punished us by never sitting up. And forgive my conviction

           that every suicide’s an asshole. There is a good reason I am not

God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.

     I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite

           your best efforts you are every second

alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,

     each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

          We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.

but she still looked good to me, she still looked good, and all thanks to an ugly horse who wrote this poem

         
I learned that while I am still addicted to telling anyone willing to read what I think I think if I'm not less addicted I'm at least more interested in exploring the improbability of ceasing to daily disingenuously bemoan that addiction and take steps towards actively shutting the fuck up about the addiction, I said at Thursday Night Pints at questions of What the fuck was with the static? Lamest fucking post ever, said L, all agreed. Most of the evening's talk, as always, can't/don't/won't be mentioned here. Most of what I want to talk about, I in fact said, I can't/don't/won't onblog. And then we talked about the things I can't/don't/won't blog about and things K and L wanted to talk about. K said, my sister's husband has a blog he only allows invitees to read, you could do that. That's lame and cowardly, I said. L said, that's like the family letter your uncle mails with the Christmas card that details the year of his immediate family. Walter, I said. Walter who? asked K. The Walter who gets mentioned in three sentences in Friday's post.

   

• Fine metaphors abound: Atrios links to Pierce who slams Sullivan re: Hillarian Inevitability. This is why, K, I resort to links rather than re-paraphrase for xillionth time, I said. And that was your Clusterfuck Link of the Day. I really am tired of fishing for clusterfuck links as if amassing them changes or reaffirms anyone's mind (including if not mostly mine) more than (none) just one. The concept is still in R&D, this a test balloon, yes?
• Rhetorical question, that. Day by day.
• Dissent, disappointment, and draconian rule.
• So much for that balloon.
• When schools become dead zones of imagination.
• Bleggalgazing a tenth birthday. Happies!
• This week in water.
• Aimless and contemplative.
• The books we've lost.
• Because.
• 100 reasons Baltimore is better than DC.
• Lord & Taylors versue White Flint Mall.
• Scott's Run WV, circa 1930s. I feel asleep sometime the past week thinking about Felix Grant and his evening jazz show on WMAL when I was a kid, how one of the ads, almost every ad-break, was in support of the Rural Electrification Act.
• A new phenomenology? Object>subject>subject>object>fuck me.
• How to read philosophy.
• Why don't people want to read eBooks on tablets?
• Bukowski was born 93 years ago today. Not so much anymore, but 30 years ago his novels and poems influenced how I read and write.

a 340 dollar horse and a 100 dollar whore

Charles Bukowski

don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me

at the racetrack any day half drunk

betting quarters, sidewheelers and straight thoroughs,

but let me tell you, there are some women there

who go where the money goes, and sometimes when you

look at these whores these onehundreddollar whores

you wonder sometimes if nature isn’t playing a joke

dealing out so much breast and ass and the way

it’s all hung together, you look and you look and

you look and you can’t believe it; there are ordinary women

and then there is something else that wants to make you

tear up paintings and break albums of Beethoven

across the back of the john; anyhow, the season

was dragging and the big boys were getting busted,

all the non-pros, the producers, the cameraman,

the pushers of Mary, the fur salesman, the owners

themselves, and Saint Louie was running this day:

a sidewheeler that broke when he got in close;

he ran with his head down and was mean and ugly

and 35 to 1, and I put a ten down on him.

the driver broke him wide

took him out by the fence where he’d be alone

even if he had to travel four times as far,

and that’s the way he went it

all the way by the outer fence

traveling two miles in one

and he won like he was mad as hell

and he wasn’t even tired,

and the biggest blonde of all

all ass and breast, hardly anything else

went to the payoff window with me.

that night I couldn’t destroy her

although the springs shot sparks

and they pounded on the walls.

later she sat there in her slip

drinking Old Grandad

and she said

what’s a guy like you doing

living in a dump like this?

and I said

I’m a poet

and she threw back her beautiful head and laughed.

you? you . . . a poet?

I guess you’re right, I said, I guess you’re right.

but still she looked good to me, she still looked good,

and all thanks to an ugly horse

who wrote this poem.

How Beautifully I Fake!

• Last night I sat in a house I won't identify at a dinner party with people I won't identify and I participated in conversations whose details I won't reveal here (though I''d like to).
• Today I'm at work at an institution I don't directly name (though I'd like to). It's in flux, both within the micro but especially the macro, some of it fascinating, the dire speculations about the future, which I won't discuss here (though I'd like to).
• There's the unfortunate death of a popular blogger I won't name (though I'd like to) who did me an unKind that I won't describe (though I'd like to) (it was years ago, though I remember the incident like a fresh wound, he no doubt promptly forgot if he noticed at all), plus subsequent indulgent bleggalgazing I won't post here (though I'd like to), bleggalgazing just slightly more popular than an unread post full of quotes from the novels and letters of an 18th C American novelist.
• I've a photo of a dad and his kid I'd love to post here, but I won't, though I don't feel cowardly about this one since the dad asked me not to post it.
• All won'ts in the prior four bullets were first can'ts. I can. I won't.
• I will say on twitter yesterday I was reminded - I am such a dope - that tics and allusions I assume others get others don't. Thanks. I need constant reminders to Fuck It. 
• Yes, I understand the tics and allusions are in service to my won'ts, are proxy Fuck Its.
• So, have yap about my reading slump. Another review of Gass' Middle C. I started it twice, quit early, recognizing my mind is still too blocked to engage it. I am 3/4s through an unsatisfying reread of Mason & Dixon, I have the new McElroy and see the above comment about Middle C, but I'm surprised I find myself thinking about about Vollmann's Ice Shirts, I'm attempting a reread of all the previously released volumes of his Seven Dreams in anticipation of the Fall release of the next. Fathers & Crows is my favorite. It concerns the first interactions of the group that founded the institution I won't name with Native Americans and the mutual carnage that ensued. I have an extra copy, you have three days to claim it before I send it to one of the two of you who claim most of these.

• What, google didn't do it? What the fuck am I going to do with the 35 pressure cookers I ordered online yesterday?
• Feel free to laugh.
• In defense of leakers.
• Un-Manning.
• Libertarian Democrats search for a leader! Or something.
• On the State monopoly on sanctioned violence.
• UPDATE! I soooooooo call bullshit.
• Texas running out of execution drugs.
• Purple Line.
• Even littler eyes.
• The five most sinister things about Disney World.
• One hundred years of nosebleeds.

I AM AN ATHEIST WHO SAYS HIS PRAYERS

Karl Shapiro

I am an atheist who says his prayers.

I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath.

I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three.

I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who. People argue about my modesty.

I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially.

A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff.

I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself.

I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion.

I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me.

I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance.

I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever.

I love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair.

I take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars.

Without compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip!

The homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror.

Pitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel!

Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey.

How beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side.

For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.

The Afternoon Will Fold You Up, Along with Preoccupations that Now Seem So Important, Until Only a Child Running Around on a Unicycle Occupies Center Stage

Google kept sending me emails telling me to renew my domain name or lose it and the blog, I said last night at Thursday Night Pints to K's question of what the google drama was last week. Google was no help, I said, they provided a button to a link for supposed renewal but google wouldn't recognize my log-in and password. Their help forums are useless. A Kind reader gave me workarounds, they aren't foolproof, they rely heavily on google being both incompetent and indifferent - safe bet there, said L - and my due diligence. Bleggalgazing continued briefly, K and L each offered a version of should this blog disappear I'll live quite nicely and more profitably should I survive withdrawal. L said, there are other ways to be an attention slut, you know. Hilltop talk, much of which can't be shared here but discussion of Hilltop's expansionist ambitions in general and bid to build a campus on the old Walter Reed campus (I could add a link to the Hilltop blog with the story, but, er.... no, google if you're interested). I was given grief that my liberal Maryland congressperson voted no on NSA amendment, their liberal Virginia congressperson voted yes. I've always said, I said, I could live in the People's Republic of Arlington if I had to. L asked, I've seen new stuff at your other places, are you going to shut them down now that you think the main one is safe? Probably not, I said, maybe VNTY'SGRVYD (though I like the name), maybe the tumblr (though I like I can't see if anyone is reading it), not DRGDKCLB. K asked, are you going to link to them tomorrow? Are you going to post the new poems? Yes, I said, and probably.

• Towards a post-Occupy world: start with non-overtly-Corporate economic functions.
• Ladies and gentlemen, your Democratic House Minority Leader!
• Weekly yodel: the true value of the Snowden Affair isn't in the state secrets revealed, it's in the revelation of the actions of State actors.
• Above the law.
• They know more than you think.
• A friend claims I should wait before condemning Wyden as a coward, that he is revealing little by little to apply leverage to see if he can affect change without revealing all he knows, he will never go as far as I want him to go he's prepared to go further than I think he is to... what? risk his career? risk jail?
• GOP POTUS 16 candidate praises Obama's advancement of police state.
• Today's euphemism: kinetic option. Read to bottom paragraph.
• A pox on optimism?
• The rise of America's princling class.

• greed, lust, wrath, pride.
• On obsession.
• Self-portrait in a convex mirror.
• Brookeville!
• Foucault, Habermas, the debate that never was.
• Wallace Stevens' Argentinian abstraction.
• No that there was doubt, but if you wondered if Arcade Fucking Fire could fuck-up a decent Gabriel song, the answer is yes.
• Savage night at the opera.
• The names of instruments.
• My new love.
• My favorite year.
• This song was put in my head last night was still in my head this morning:

LIKE A SENTENCE

John Ashbery

How little we know,   

and when we know it!

It was prettily said that “No man

hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards

in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .

Never mind, dears, the afternoon

will fold you up, along with preoccupations   

that now seem so important, until only a child   

running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.   

Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you   

will have to come up with something,

be it a terraced gambit above the sea

or gossip overheard in the marketplace.

For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:

for the old to envy the young,

and for youth to fear not getting older,

where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

And it was said of Gyges that his ring

attracted those who saw him not,

just as those who wandered through him were aware

only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,

while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,

whether it was something they could be part of

sans affront to self-esteem.

And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,

nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,

were no place you could count on,

having taken a proverbial powder

as rifle butts received another notch.

I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring   

when summer came along and took it from me   

like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment

while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.   

But here it is winter, and wrong

to speak of other seasons as though they exist.   

Time has only an agenda

in the wallet at his back, while we

who think we know where we are going unfazed

end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know

by the unexpectedness of ice and stars

and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,

a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease

one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down   

into this wagonload of prisoners.

The meter will be screamingly clear then,

the rhythms unbounced, for though we came

to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating   

even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails

of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,   

only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

"New Narrative" Is Judged Seditious

Found something I wrote twenty-five years ago while looking for something else. I thought it was gone forever, I'd been regretting its disappearance for years. It won't appear here, neither what I wrote or what a friend and mentor wrote in the margins. See tags for hint. Should I be more pleased than aghast or more aghast than pleased I recognize a younger me as my obvious predecessor? As mentioned yesterday, the objects of adoration change, the ardor of faith doesn't. Light reading elsewhere in any case, and an arrghfree day of links in celebration of surprise discovery and exhumation of previous self. Figures in a landscape. The above photo from a project from last year. In the shit. Serendipitously, new moleskin required two days ago. This is sand. Because reevaluation of old work requires reexamination of current work. Old rockers. I'd like to think it could appear here, it probably won't, though why it won't will no doubt make an appearance. No tears. Ashbery and Pasternak part one, part two. Working to change the equations which involves factoring damn on both sides of equal. RIP Faye Hunter. Ashbery's birthday in four days, I haven't forgot. The tennis-court oath. I realize I always approach the what-the-fuck and turn away, I'll see. The instruction manual. I haven't forgot Kate Bush's birthday is in six days.




 
...BY AN EARTHQUAKE

John Ashbery

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.

B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.

B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.

A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.

A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.

A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.

A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”

A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.

A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket

of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.

A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into

the hands of A’s friend, A-2.

Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.

Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.

A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.

A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.

A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.

A dies of psychic shock.

Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.

Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.

Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.   

A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.

Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.

Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.

A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.   

Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.

Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.

Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.

Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.

Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.

In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.

More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.

Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.

Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.

A violent wind blows the fog around.

Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.

Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.

Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.

Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.

A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.

Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend.

Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.

“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.

Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.

Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.   

Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.

Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.

Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.

Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.

In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.   

Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.

B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.   

B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.

A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.

Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.

Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.   

No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.   

Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.

Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.