When I hit lull here I look at what posted here same time every year my lulls have seasons. Wise some to calendar's whys my feints don't not work I am typing this poem for example re: this is me each late June Haiku standard sign seventeen by seventeen sheeyit seventeen? my square rectangled on digital tablet bray, this is how I mope
My wife and daughter teachers, my parents teachers, aunts, uncles, teachers me, mite, thirty years at a university servicing teachers Academic Years your junior year your senior year universes wormholed but quadrant apart, it's hard on teachers all I want to say this mostest late June since the last most June until next year's moster June
HIDDEN BIRD
Joseph Ceravolo
Song birds enter the morning the pre-dawn before the fires, you know, when the night floats away like vapor on a lake, or like kisses in the woods. Songs that even creation might not remember.
Continuous, threaded, as if a cherry pit were stuck in the throat to produce the trumpet of the branches. So varies, yet never, changing through all the days, since reptiles fell to earth.
I give up the reason for the sound I give up the creature of sound and the creator of the creatures and of us and of dawn and air and of vacuum and human inhumanity. I give up the song. I give up the place.
Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live
with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade
of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the
stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism”
where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is
true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the
assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six
hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also,
the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is
comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know
what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and
you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually
happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . .
the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR
was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system
running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar
federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms,
basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather
prophetic.
William Gaddis, born ninety-seven years ago today, in a 1986 interview.
Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the
community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in
the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to
mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway
kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news
headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by
definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with
that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn &
Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed
283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).
- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own
Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever
occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand
misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be
taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it
can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be
organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume
that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that
disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from
outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin,
perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...
- Gaddis, JR
I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.
- Gaddis, Recognitions
I need Gaddis to write a 2020 novel, I need new eyes and renewed concentration to reread the 2020 novels he wrote, will use old eyes and tattered concentration to read at least one of his 2020 novels written mid-last century in 2020
Unmaking World Literature: The major implication of this book is that literature itself may be left
behind as the dividing lines over culture begin to be drawn elsewhere
instead.
Woke up with This Heat in head, more songs at that link
INCANDESCENT WAR POEM SONNET
Bernadette Mayer
Even before I saw the chambered nautilus
I wanted to sail not in the us navy
Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter
At the same time his letter, the view of you
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes
I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty
With your long eventual hair, is love king?
What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that
I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck
To one subject but I'll mention nobody said
You have to get young Americans some ice cream
In the artificial light in which she woke
Helmetball: the ultimate Ideological State Apparatus.
Global capitalism and fan culture: The role played by fans like myself in this ongoing cycle of
accumulation typifies the pivotal function of immaterial labor in global
capitalism’s information economy – which we might also describe as
“cognitive capitalism.” While we feel flattered by the media industries’
newfound ability to give us exactly what we want (or, at least, what we think
we want), our actual participation remains largely limited to
collaboration, promotion, and consumption. And even though
transformative and appropriative practices like fan fiction clearly
still exist, their potential for actual subversion is radically limited
within an environment where media producers have cannily appropriated
those very forms.
Another try: anyone know Mark Wood? His ::: wood s lot ::: hasn't updated in seven weeks.
So, all the links? Jack Cox's Dodge Rose was OK but not up to the hype (though it is a type of Beckettesque novel I don't so much resist as can't absorb) and de la Paz' Naked Singularity read like a motherfucking Gilmore Girls episode, everyone so fucking witty as they debate the great issues. I'm between novels. O, tried Dahlgren for the umpteenth time. I was born without the gene. Between novels, hence lotsa links.
TRADITION
Juliana Spahr
I hold out my hand.
I hand over
and I pass on.
I hold out my hand.
I hold out my hand.
I hand over
and I pass on.
Some call this mothering,
this way I begin each day by holding out my hand and then all day
long pass on.
Some call this caretaking,
this way all day and all night long, I hold out my hand and take engine
oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to
this other thing that once was me, this not really me.
This soothing obligation
This love.
This hand over
and this pass on.
This part of me and this not really me.
This me and engine oil additive.
This me and not really me and engine oil additive.
Back and forth.
All day long, like a lion I lie where I will with not really me
and I bestow upon not really me
refractive index testing oils and wood preservatives.
I lie with not really me all day long,
and so I bequeath not really me a honeyed wine of flame retardants
and fire preventing agents.
I make a milk like nectar,
a honeyed nectar of capacitor dielectrics, dyes, and electrical insulation
and I pass it on every two hours to not really me.
Not really me is a ram perched on a cliff above a stream,
unable to be quenched by the flame retardant in furniture.
Not really me comes near
and takes a nectar of insulated pipes, and some industrial paints.
Later I pass the breast cup to not really me,
a breast cup filled with sound insulation panels and imitation wood
with a little nectar and sweetness.
And not really me drinks it and then complains a little,
rebuking me, for my cakes of nuts and raisins
are cakes of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas,
for my apples are filled with televisions and windshield wiper blades.
On my breast are the curls of not really me
and against the brow of not really me wafts plasticizer used in heat
transfer systems.
As drinking not really me takes in anger and in need
not really me drinks from the hand of that sweetest sleep the juice of me
that cup of adhesives,
that cup of fire retardants,
of pesticide extenders.
And as not really me drinks
I cradle the moon and not really me in my right hand
my lips kissing with the dedusting agents and wax extenders.
Then later in the night,
the bed scattered with the stains of cutting oils and gas-transmission
turbines,
the blankets with blends of hydraulic fluid,
we lie there together
handing over and passing on
filled up and attempting to think our way through
economics and labor and time and biology
me and not really me
together.
I'd like to think we had agreed upon this together,
that we had a tradition,
that we agreed these things explained us to us
but when not really me wakes
after drinking the pharmaceuticals and photo chemicals
night after night
and day after day
not really me will sing a song of rebuke,
sing the song of not really me, the song that
goes like Salutations to brominated fire retardants of Koppers Ind.
goes like Salutations to water/oil repellant paper coating of 3M
goes like Salutations to wiper blades of Asahi
goes like Salutations to bike chain lubrication of Clariant International
goes like Salutations to wire and cable insulation of Daikin
goes like Salutations to pharmaceutical packaging of DuPont
goes like Salutations to nail polish of Dyneon
goes like Salutations to engine oil additive of Agrevo E
goes like Salutations to hair curling and straightening of Agsin Ptd. Ltd.
goes like Salutations to insecticide and termiticide for empty green-
houses of Chevron Chemical
goes like Salutations to greenhouse flowers of Monsanto
goes like Salutations to insecticide to kill fire ants of Rigo Co.
goes like Salutations to plasticizers of US Borax Inc.
Not really me's song will go on and on
Not really me will sing it all night long
hour after hour for weeks on end.
It will have eighty-five company names in it.
It will have twenty-one chemical functions in it.
It will have ninety-seven products in it.
It will have two hundred trade names in it.
Not really me's song will rotate through these names in all their
combinations.
And then it will end with another part that is as long as the first and
inventories the chemicals that not really me does not yet know.
But oh those of you who are not really me at all
I say let wisdom be your anvil and knowledge your hammer.
About Hollowtide: now that I've tuned it - please, look at the Fleabus photo (I am now Fleabus' official photographer) on header now there (though there will be a new header - or at least a different header - each new post, it's one of Hollowtide's attractions for me. But now the downhill - in blogging, as in hiking, I'd rather go uphill than down, knees-wise. But true: this may surprise you, but I'm remarkably unorganized and confuse tablets and otherwise poorly archive myself. I don't timestamp tablets, and I want a timestamp sometimes.Whether I'll ever need one and/or use one.... So it's more than the bibloggal mania.
Speaking of that Fleabus photo - the camera on my iPhone is vastly superior to the the Canon I've used past couple of years, but I am unable to download content to my laptop because I haven't updated iTunes in at least three years. The last time I did it fucked up everything. Now, I know all my music is in the cloud, so I'm going to upgrade tonight - if you have any advice (including DON'T DO IT) please send along.
Assuming the upgrades go smooth, I will order THIS to celebrate.
The errant eye: on Pollock and fake Pollocks and how to tell the difference. After my relatives mock Rothko at a holiday table someone brings up Pollock, some dinners visa versa.
If I'm Hillary, the only person on that stage I'd worry about is Marco Rubio. He could play a sane and rational person on TV during a national election.
The previous statements do not imply Hillary is a sane and rational person, nor that she is not a frighteningly creepy asshole.
Ditto Obama. Anyone who dreams of being POTUS.
My apologies: I will not expose myself to another POTUS debate, primary or general election seasons. Hadn't had a shitty sugar rush like that since the last time I watched, will never watch again.
John Newlove, a poet new to me that looks worth a look.
OK, a pivot. Short stories. I have Lucia Berlin on my desk upon recommendation of friend - I can't read novels, I don't want to read just poetry, suggestions on who to try desperately solicited. And any advice on reading short stories desperately solicited. I don't have to plow through an entire collection do I? It's not immoral slutting to read a story in a collection by one author then a story in a collection by another author before finishing the collection of the first author, is it?
It's not going to work.
This Heat. Was going to post two more Beethoven sonatas, but saw this. Click tag for more.
Above, seventy seconds from yesterday. Yes I posted it last night, deleted that post when this one went live, I put it there last night for someone probably not you.
Most leaves will be down by next weekend.
The Omidyar Insurgency. I confess, the whole Taibbi/Omidyar divorce doesn't interest me as once it would.
The obamaphile I gratuitously baited last week kept saying Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz, you want Ted Cruz to be president? Aren't you afraid of Ted Cruz, he asked.
See bottom bullet for more, but my eyes ache after an hour of reading novels, ease but ache again after an hour of reading poetry, which is not excuse but part explanation why I fish links to post on days very few read since I'm reading online anyway, which doesn't hurt my eyes, or maybe does when I read from a book. As for the rash of thwarted bleggalgazing of late, I had a long email from L last night, the Death of Thursday Night Pints has denied me a vital spigot.
The Disruption Machine: Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of
bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about
the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a
theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the
divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the
fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was
usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline,
a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in
the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once
pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started
something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time
can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began
looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better
than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the
nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and
then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is
atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about
financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and
shaky evidence.
Another murderous milestone: Our 21st century intervention in Iraq has killed far more people much more quickly, of course. But as we gear up for yet another round of slaughter in
the country we have recently demolished, it’s good to be reminded that
none of this is new or unusual; it is, very simply — and quite horribly —
the way the bipartisan American elite do business. Violence is their
profession, their religion, their guiding light. They use violence to
advance their agenda, then use more violence to deal with the inevitable
horrific consequences spawned by their violence, on and on in an
endless cycle.
Guess what I fell asleep listening to and woke up with in my head. Click tab in footer for more. Expect more in coming days. MSADI5G, yes, they are in the inner circle.
If Brazil ends up winning this World Cup remember that Chilean ball of the crossbar in the 120th. And I suspect that if anyone is going to beat Brazil it will be Colombia.
See, Solar Crumpet works as long as I'm not distracted but I'm easily distracted and my eyes are old and ache after an hour. Long ago I made a rule that I can only read one novel at a time - I'm curious re: my dilemma when I finish Sawn Yawns - do I immediately go to A Bounded Thriving Wig or read something else? I put down Sawn Yawns at eye ache, picked up Hejinian (another rule: no music permitted when reading novels, music allowed when reading poetry) and found my This Heat on the iPod.
[A DREAM, STILL CLINGING LIKE LIGHT TO THE DARK, ROUNDING]
Lyn Hejinian
A dream, still clinging like light to the dark, rounding
The gap left by things which have already happened
Leaving nothing in their place, may have nothing to do
But that. Dreams are like ghosts achieving ghosts' perennial goal
Of revoking the sensation of repose. It's terrible
To think we write these things for them, to tell them
Of our life - that is, our whole life. Along comes a dream
Of a machine. Why? What is being sold there? How is the product emitted?
It must have been sparked by a noise, the way the very word "spark"
Emits a brief picture. Is it original? Inevitable?
We seem to sleep so as to draw the picture
Of events that have already happened so we can picture
them. A dream for example of a procession to an execution site.
How many strangers could circle the space while speaking of nostalgia
And of wolves in the hills? We find them
Thinking of nothing instead - there's no one to impersonate, nothing
To foresee. It's logical that prophesies would be emitted
Through the gaps left by previous things, or by the dead
Refusing conversation and contemplating beauty instead.
But isn't that the problem with beauty - that it's apt in retrospect
To seem preordained? The dawn birds are trilling
A new day - it has the psychical quality of "pastness" and they are trailing
It. The day breaks in an imperfectly continuous course
Of life. Sleep is immediate and memory nothing.
Went to sleep with that Sonic Youth song in my head.
That novel I posted a photo of yesterday? It failed me, I didn't fail it, I gave a hundred pages, fifty more than I should have because I thought it was my fault the novel sucked, it wasn't, the novel sucked. Baal save me from first novels written in the first person in which every character in every dialogue competes to be the smartest and most cuttingly ironically detached social observer. Sure, it's like twitter, or Stringtown, or your staff lounge, it's me, doesn't mean I want to read it. I can't tell you how liberating it is to know in this one case with this one novel it wasn't me at fault. Best SHAZAM! that's happened to me since the last until the next. An unshackling.
We talked about trolls last night at Thursday Night Pints. Analog trolls, digital trolls, trolls at work, trolls in real life, trolls in Stringtown. The trolls we are, to others, to ourselves. There were details in the stories I can't talk about (analog trolls) and details in the stories I could talk about (digital trolls) but only the first is interesting, the second, fuck that. The history of trolling - there's always been trolling - and technological innovations in trolling. Fuckwads in our lives, how we can avoid being fuckwads in return. And fail.
Contained selves: In the machinery of social media, none of this experience need be
particularly transgressive to be felt as transformative. Posting videos
of one’s cat is sufficient to tremble the network. The contradictions
and intensities and dangers of attempting to write the truth about
oneself are made accessible to anyone with a Tumblr, and at the same
time, new resources other than opaque language are readily available to
convey affect on social-media sites. These resources (gifs, links,
images, likes, screen grabs, serial selfies, cut-and-paste collages,
etc.) can seem to express the self without the same limits brought about
by the imprecision or, maybe more often, the overprecision of one’s own
words, which come from some posited central location of the “I.” That
“I” is a transcendental trap, binding one to the posited position of the
speaking subject.
Joe Fucking Biden calling Latin American presidents, telling them they only *think* they know what a motherfucking asshole America can be, so remember your fucking place.
Ohio River. This is true: The Ohio is the bigger river when it merges with the Mississippi, it should be the Ohio River that flows through New Orleans.
Blogbud emails last night re: This Heat. I had commented at his place, thanks for reminding me of the band, they had fallen off my playlist. They are fifth or sixth on his Sillyass Desert Island Game, he wanted to mention. I wrote back: Hey, thanks for email. It scares me how much I've forgot. Literally twenty minutes ago I flashed on Thomas Berger's novels, thought, when was the last time anyone thought about.. More often than not I'm glad it's a too full world. That's not true. I'm always glad it's a too full world. As for blegging, verily, what the fuck if it's our hydrant? He wrote back, Verily, yea... hydrantizing and all. Verily, blgglgzng the blgdysfsmmr.
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze
At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes--
The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out
Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.
A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once
He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers--
Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked
Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans
Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,
Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
To wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,
The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:
George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit
And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,
The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
