Yesterday the President of Columbia University told congress she supports peaceful free speech then asked the NYPD to forcibly remove Columbia students peacefully protesting the American-Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft in Gaza (and then kicked said protesters out of Columbia) and the United States, which professes to support a two-state solution in Palestine vetoed a UN resolution calling on a two-state solution while Biden told Netanyahu go ahead and slaughter the Gazans trapped in Raffa, you have my blessing as long as you don't attack Iran to which Israel attacked Iran while a sitting US senator called for the legalized ramming and killing of anti-genocide protesters blocking major roads, and you and I are called the whackfucks, I call this "Thursday," my headshot today:
Zionists sadistically celebrate the genocide and ethnic cleansing for the genocide and ethnic cleansing (plus the land they will steal), western shitlords cheerfully celebrate the genocide and ethnic cleansing as a golden opportunity to criminalize and normalize crushing any and all dissent in the future but from the Left specifically in the present. Hinkiest war ever, gonna get a fuckton hinkier, more hinkiness in grid
"Carcerality was ALWAYS the next logical step for Zionist repression on campus. We spent years warning colleagues that shit was headed in a bad direction, but too many of them tut-tutted those warnings because they wanted to preserve their institutional privileges"
Protesting the genocide is FAR WORSE than the genocide itself, says professional sh*tsmear
"Minouche Shafik was the vice president of the World Bank, the deputy managing director of the IMF, and the deputy governor of the Bank of England. When you put an economic hitman in charge of an elite academic institution, the end result is a pro-genocide university"
"You have to fuck up on a truly historic level to get the NYPD to say “even we think these were meaningless arrests.” They love meaningless arrests!
Anne Carson interview! Weird to me how little notice and noise her new collection *Wrong Norma* is getting, been through it twice, is as fabulous as you'd expect
Bought Vollmann's new novel last night, Earthgirl and I were in Politics and Prose, me ordered by me not to buy anything, no novels, no poetry, not only last night but
{Sunday links added below}
until I finish what I'm currently not reading, and almost make it until behind the counter where Earthgirl buying her books there it was, *The Lucky Star,* a Tenderloin novel, my least favorite Vollmann, and didn't think twice, as kneejerk as breathing, sitting on sofa now besides me as I type this sentence
Below by Douglas Kearney
in the March 2020 issue of Poetry
I subscribed to for thirty years, got bored, stopped for ten years, picked up the latest three years ago and resubscribed again, praise to the current editor Don Share and his associates, it's not the stolid establishment snore I quit thirteen years ago (poem at bottom same issue)
I don't read Vollmann's non-fiction not because Vollmann's non-fiction not good but because I don't read non-fiction (though I did read *Dolores* - which is connected to the Tenderloin novels of which *The Lucky Star* is the latest) (though I am making myself read short sections of Arendt daily on mobs because because), I am telling you three times (which the Nez Perce say to emphasize a point in *The Dying Grass* (have any of you I sent it to read it?), which I've stolen and use as a constant gag here) I like his Tenderloin novels but love love love his Seven Dream novels, William the Blind my favorite Vollmann
There's a new Archers of Loaf song!
Reminder: this shitty blog's theme song one is by Archers of Loaf, look, it's over to the left at top of blegrell
Serendipitously, Crooked Fingers' *Dignity and Shame* released fifteen years ago today (this!)
Our motherfucking professional Democrats are slow, of course Sanders a Russian agent, why didn't they trot that out *before* New Hampshire?
Good duh: If there’s any real parallel to be drawn between Trump and Sanders, it’s how their respective rises have revealed the flubby redundancy of their respective parties’ establishments.
Better Warrenism? As far as I can tell, what Elizabeth Warren wants is the kind of democracy and market economy she thought we had when she was a Republican, but was scandalized to discover we didn’t have, thanks to the undue influence of self-dealing moneyed interests in the policymaking process. Like that's a *good* thing.
If the Park Service thinks people are annoyed now, wait until the first speed AT through-hikers show up in late April - early May to cross the Potomac and learn any time they set will be disqualified by a shuttle workaround
Major chapter in William Vollmann's Europe Central. I'm reading it again.
The axle character on which all spokes spin is Shostakovich, and this chapter provides necessary biographical and historical background of his relationship with Soviet authorities before then during The Terror, then the Great Patriotic War, then after.
The axle theme on which everything Vollmann writes spins is Power: application, resistance to, my complicity.
Always topical, some times more than others.
Fucker can write but bosses you around, shoves you into Black Marias, dungeons, squeezes your ouchies (in every novel, not just this one, not just this one and the Dreams).
I wince and read (I also laugh out loud sometimes).
Power, its application, resistance to it, my complicity.
Anyway, I've a PDF of the chapter, if you ask nice and I like you I'll send it to you password-free.
That's a main character in Europe Central.
Akhmatova's a character in the novel too, she's in this chapter, and - Serendipitously - this was posted here Monday.
When a colleague of many years tastes power and the entire department's frequencies vrzzt.
It wasn't me who uhoh-ed the awooga. I knew it was awooga, would never awooga first.
This is a main character in Europe Central.
THE LAST TOAST
Anna Akhmatova
I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.
-
It began at dawn with fighter planes:
they came in off the sea and didn’t rise,
they leaped the sandbar one and one and one
coming so fast the crockery they shook down
off my kitchen shelves was spinning in the air
when they were gone.
They came in off the sea and drew a wave
of lagging cannon-shells across our roofs.
Windows spat glass, a truck took sudden fire,
out leaped the driver, but the truck ran on,
growing enormous, shambling by our street-doors,
coming and coming …
By every right in town, by every average
we knew of in the world, it had to stop,
fetch up against a building, fall to rubble
from pure force of burning, for its whole
body and substance were consumed with heat
but it would not stop.
And all of us who knew our place and prayers
clutched our verandah-rails and window-sills,
begging that truck between our teeth to halt,
keep going, vanish, strike … but set us free.
And then we saw the wild boys of the street
go running after it.
And as they followed, cheering, on it crept,
windshield melting now, canopy-frame a cage
torn by gorillas of flame, and it kept on
over the tramlines, past the church, on past
the last lit windows, and then out of the world
with its disciples.
My generation got the best ever world (peak human optimism) and, regardless whether we had handbrakes on sled and failed or we won the inevitability lottery and had no say, the slide to extinction began on our watch.
Death to the Either/Or.
We - the animal - deserve what we get.
The GOP is a zombie, the Democrats a ghost: The Republican Party steers the ship of state toward an iceberg, and
from below decks, Steny Hoyer gleefully cackles that this sure is gonna
reflect badly on the captain.
I cannot gauge how much anger at real life motherfuckery (eyes, knees, work) taints anger at oligarchal clusterfuckery and more importantly visa-versary, I just know every fucking thing runs banshee all the fucking time, it never fucking stops (except when hiking with Earthgirl (and now not even then now and then when hiking in my head)) and fucking I.
I have not read one of the Gospels in at least twenty years. Nothing more than just occurred to me.
One of the oldest gags at this shitty blog was posting a artist rendering of the true face of Jesus. I don't want to link to it, but the guy was brown.
Dennis the Peasant is 74 today:
Ahaha, as Nez Perce warrior victoriously laughs as he shoots a Bluecoat off Bluecoat's horse PIM! in Vollmann's Dying Grass, it's slaying me, slowly.
Horses talk, hinimi!
Now would be a good time to read a Vollmann novel. One of the five of seven Dreams, yes yes yes, but also Royal Family, or maybe, especially, if you won't dream, Central Europe. I can help you out.
Vollmann understands the animal we are, that we are animals, rutting, yes, but thinking too, especially.
I have just killed the buzz I had on rereading Dying Grass.
I have just killed the buzz I could have had on rereading Central Europe.
We are being rewired.
This shitty blog is nothing if not a visiting of stations in their rote turn in their rote order, like the mule I am, unable to yoke without grindstones. A post like this is likely followed by remorse I posted this post and sullen silence for the weekend. Let's watch.
Such a good album, some tweet put this song in my head last night:
YOU ALWAYS PROMISED ME A ROSE GARDEN
Tom Clark
Thank you America for inviting me to indulge
In your wish fulfillment fantasies
And for inducing me to occupy myself perpetually
With mere illusions instead of striving
To find a solution for the real problems of life
Thank you for reminding me that you aren't there
So that I can treat you as my intimate friend
And if your tone seems nervous, constrained, embarrassed
As though you were speaking always about yourself
It is because you have created a middle kingdom
For yourself and your creations
Which is forever remote from my world
But into which you would be ready to award me
Extra-territorial entry rights, leaning forward
To speak to me over the footlights
In a language I would never be able to understand.
I'm rereading Vollmann's Dying Grass. I offered Frances a free copy - I offer you one too.
I've Vollmann yodeled already, plus finx muck je if I yodel again, though I think I can safely say this: read the five of Vollmann's already published Seven Dreams - in any order - for better understanding of this motherfucking country.
Once again I urge you to drive the speed limit, no more than five miles above, and watch the assholes. Life in the Assholoscene. It's made me less of one, says a person related to me by marriage.
Re: my rereading Dying Grass and jinxing that rereading above - in the past months I have failed rereadings of Against the Day, 2666, Never Let Me Go, Sot-Weed Factor, Moby Dick, Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Life and Fate, and while I contend I haven't abandoned The Tunnel I confess I've stopped digging.
It's a side-effect, not a direct result, of Life in the Assholoscene. My eyes - I've simply lost endurance, I can't read in bed, I can't read for hours any more - are as much, if not more, to blame.
But I wake up this morning, and everyone but people on the Left like me and people on the Right that I despise (and who despise me) is giddy with war, with relief at Trump's belligerent normalcy.
I'm off to play Seneca, lose my Burnt Orange Wedge in the briars.
HOW THINGS WORK
Gary Soto
Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
Yes, I posted (happy) news of Planet then pulled it down because bastards, posted a mood then pulled it down because the mood passed, posted the backside of the above, which is the front side too. The new tablet, a Leuchtturm 1917, washes superlatively. Doesn't PDF as clear as the moleskins or boorum & pease, but washes superlatively.
So there's tablet rule writing and bleggalgazing, so I'm happy.
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E Smith. Innermost circle of rotating musicians in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Click The Fall tag for much more. I suspect that many of the youtubes are dead, the posts go back years. Sorry, I love you, I'm not going to go reanimate corpses.
There were eight octogenarians, four men, four women, at the table next to ours last night at Yuan Fu. They were discussing Trump - Earthgirl and Planet can vouch. They said everything anyone who isn't pro-Trump would say, though an 80 year old woman saying she doesn't want to know what Trump has or doesn't in his pants is funny. One guy sat silent the entire time until, finally prodded to say something, offered, Adlai Stevenson is rolling in his grave. Shut up, Herman, said (presumably) his wife.
Psst - it'd be easier, if no less futile, to portray Trump as a con man if your hand-chosen Tube wasn't Marco Rubio, a man whose first and last name appropriately contain terms carnies call paying fools.
I was reading JR simultaneously with Vollmann's Dying Grass but ceded JR to Dying Grass not for Dying Grass' sake but for JR's. It deserves to be read alone. But I've picked up Infinite Jest, I've picked up Vollmann's Europe Central, I'm now reading them simultaneously.
The Infinite Jest before returning to JR's rereading is deliberate - I was 200 pages into JR, I'm going to have to start again at the beginning, I need to give myself a couple of months break before that.
The Europe Central is unexpected, but a friend asked me where to start with Europe Central, he picked up a copy, I picked up my copy, here I am.
Mary Ruefle has two new poems (one below) at Paris Review.
MILK SHAKE Mary Ruefle
I am never lonely and never bored. Except when I bore myself, which is
my definition of loneliness—to bore oneself. It makes a body lonesome,
that. Today I am very bored and very lonely. I can think of nothing
better to do than grind salt and pepper into my milk shake, which I have
been doing since I was thirteen, which was so long ago the very word thirteen has an old-fashioned ring to it, one might as well say Ottoman Empire.
Traditionally, thirteen is an unlucky number. Little did I know at
thirteen that I was on the road, by a single action, to loneliness and
boredom. My friend Vicki and I were sitting at the lunch counter in
Woolworth’s, waiting for the milk shakes we had ordered—hers chocolate,
mine vanilla—when she got up to go to the ladies’ room. The chocolate
shake came while she was gone and as a joke I sprinkled salt and pepper
on it, because I was, though I didn’t know it, young and callous and
cruel. Vicki came back, she took the paper off her straw, she stuck her
straw in her milk shake, she sucked through the straw for what seemed an
eternity, and then she swallowed, which seemed like forever. This is the best milk shake I have ever had. That’s what she said, though she didn’t say it as much as she sighed it. The best shake I’ve ever had.
In such sudden and unexpected ways does boredom begin. I tried her milk
shake, I told her what I had done, the vanilla shake came, and we
salt-and-peppered that one, too, and afterward we were bored, so we went
shopping—we were in Woolworth’s after all—though by shopping we meant
shoplifting, as any lonely bored thirteen-year-old knows. Vicki stole a
tub of the latest invention, lip gloss, which was petroleum jelly dyed
pink, and I stole a yellow lace mantilla to wear to Mass on Easter
Sunday, though I never wore it to Mass; I wore it to confession the
Saturday before, confessing to the priest that I had stolen the very
thing I was wearing on my head. Why not? I had nothing else to confess.
Playing a mean trick on my best friend, even one that turned out all
right, didn’t seem worth the bother. What bothered me was that the
priest seemed bored by my confession; I had thought to shock him, but it
was he who shocked me, as I had so little experience of adult boredom.
He gave me three Hail Marys and closed the screen. What was happening? I
had shocked myself by stealing the mantilla and then confessing it, but
bored the priest, whose boredom now shocked me, though it would bore me
later, years later, when lip gloss was as common as clover, when the
idea of Catholic women covering their heads was antiquated, when priests
were suspected of being callous and cruel and the combination of salt
and sugar was a raging trend, served in all the swank joints and upscale
places. But, as I said, I am never lonely and never bored, and if today
is an exception, it is the age-old exception of every day, for every
day turns into tomorrow, and tomorrow turns into today, and today into
yesterday, and I confess there is very little any of us can do to change
it.
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