Systems of Ecstasy Baked into Bricks

Colin Moulding is 58 today. XTC is in the innermost  circle of bands/musicians that rotate in and out of the two open spots in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, have been for thirty-five years, and if I prefer on the whole and by more than a smidgen Andy Partridge songs to Colin Moulding songs (and recognize that XTC is a Partridge project, which is technically the entity that rotates in and our of the spots) that doesn't mean I don't love Colin Moulding songs.

• So much for the one Clusterfuck Link of the Day plan.
• Also, this past Thursday's post's title is from a Colin Moulding song (song embedded in post), serendipitous rather than planned.
• Communism and neoliberalism.
• Everything paleo is neo again.
• Illogical economics.
• Spying an Americans: summary update. 
• Breaking the rules thousands of times.
• How to trap a whistleblower.
• Despicable human, powerful Democrat.
• Remembering Leonard Peltier.
• Cowardice or avarice? Death to the either/or! 
• Clearly.
• The history of the world in a chart.
• A song of flood and fire. 
• Postcards from Google Earth.

• I got two emails re: my comment yesterday in TNP conversation about blogs that limit readership to an invitation only format. I called it "lame and cowardly." My apologies, I meant to imply that it would be lame and cowardly for me to go to that format after almost ten years of not. I understand completely why someone would choose, in posting personal items among friends - or in posting whatever the fuck you want, it's your blog - to limit the readership to only the people one wants reading.
• Yes, there was an overnight post for my daughter - hope you saw it - it's saved, will be back whenever I need it.
• Breaking kayfabe.
• Authentic ruins.
• Posted solely for the few of you who know why I'd post it. As for the movie itself, I've no idea.
• Mansionalization.
• Ten forgotten classics. Hey, D, your favorite Defoe is one of them.
• The infinity of poetry lists. 
• The Snowmass Cycle.
• Charles Olson in Mexico. 
• Another riff on Against the Day.
• New Pynchon reviewed. It's a peculiarity of musical notation that major works are, more often than not, set in a minor key, and vice versa. Bleeding Edge is mellow, plummy, minor-key Pynchon, his second such in a row since Against the Day (2006)--that still-smoking asteroid, whose otherworldly inner music readers are just beginning to tap back at. But in its world-historical savvy, its supple feel for the joys and stings of love--both married and parental--this new book is anything but minor. On the contrary, Bleeding Edge is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces. All this, plus a stripjoint called Joie de Beavre and a West Indian proctologist named Pokemon. Who else does that? 
• HOLYFUCK! HOLYFUCK! HOLYFUCK! (h/t Mr Alarum) Yes, I posted that last night too.

FIXED IDEAS

Kenneth Slessor

Ranks of electroplated cubes, dwindling to glitters,   

Like the other pasture, the trigonometry of marble,   

Death’s candy-bed. Stone caked on stone,

Dry pyramids and racks of iron balls.

Life is observed, a precipitate of pellets,

Or grammarians freeze it into spar,

Their rhomboids, as for instance, the finest crystal   

Fixing a snowfall under glass. Gods are laid out

In alabaster, with horny cartilage

And zinc ribs; or systems of ecstasy

Baked into bricks. There is a gallery of sculpture,   

Bleached bones of heroes, Gorgon masks of bushrangers;   

But the quarries are of more use than this,

Filled with the rolling of huge granite dice,

Ideas and judgments: vivisection, the Baptist Church,   

Good men and bad men, polygamy, birth-control . . .

Frail tinkling rush

Water-hair streaming

Prickles and glitters

Cloudy with bristles

River of thought

Swimming the pebbles—

Undo, loosen your bubbles!

Find Me in 232 Exactly 124 Hours From the Timestamp of This Post and I'll Buy You a Pint.

Holyfuck, I can't wait.

I've been running this 2012 ad for the last two stupidass overnight posts, but fuck it, I can't wait, and fuck it, Blegsylvania be dying anyway - this isn't about this shitty blog, or rather it is but not for the reason you think, it's about our geriatric Stringtown, our Ford Fairlains, blue handicap parking pass dangling from rear mirror, parked in front of the... Hey ! Look! Rush Limbaugh is fat!

Doesn't This Remind You of Those Things We've Done Before?

That pink putter in the basket is my bird on hole three at Seneca, though the four on 13C and three on 21B and 24C were sweet but the three on 26D was gold. Played back 9 then middle then front. Back: 3-4-3-5-3-3-4-3-4. Middle: 3-4-4-4-6-3-3-4-3 (but wasn't in the water - didn't go in all day, Dr Z twice). Front - skipped first, newby group of six-4-2-3-5-4-3-4-3. I've never putted better. I haven't played in two months. Holyfuck, beautiful day.

That's Stanley shot this morning from inside the stairwell to our basement looking out underneath the door to hallway. I need note that while I don't watch many movies - it's not a principled thing, I like them when I do, I just don't, I think to do other stuff - I recognize, as someone who organizes his music and poetry and fiction and everything into Desert Island lists, why the Oscars - and Emmys and Tonys and - are so popular, that popularity, like everything else, reminds me of my training. I've been warned to stay away from twooter the next four hours to avoid people who often complain about the taxonomies and methodologies of our ruling hierarchies competing to be the wittiest, wisest, and archest - what do you think of my entry submitted here? - twootergod of a popularity contest that celebrates the taxonomies and methodologies of our ruling hierarchies. I don't know movies to play this one, that's why I'm sitting this particular tournament out. Let's play Best Furs Song Ever!

First, It's Just the Faces Disappearing

• Blogsick and blogpissed. Fuck it. Not here, not elsewhere. 
• Regardless, enjoy the new Tindersticks! Is excellent.
• Totem and taboo.
• I hope the Nobel committee strips Obama of his peace prize for his warmongering because I want to see what conservatives, who were furious Obama received it, do and say when Obama's punished for being as big a war-criminal as the conservatives want to be.
• Chasing the bone off the porch.
• Confederacy-light.
• Of course the decline is real and self-inflicted.
• I caught five minutes of the fuckwitted Tom Ashbrook interviewing Charles Murray and Joan Walsh last night, and if Ashbrook and Walsh are our designated Liberal intellectuals, sooooo fucked.

  

• I permit myself a gif.
• Don't tweet about this.
• If you see Richard H Bradley today, tell him to fuck himself.
• Did you know Washington DC is run by clowns?
• Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?
• Scattered post-mortem thoughts on Mike Kelley.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• O! My mood needed this: one of my favorite books, scheduled to be reread later this year, early next year. Remember when Antonia tried to set Maqroll on fire and then stole his gold? Good times.
• Waiting for Wotan, the never-ending saga.
• Stream a Marissa Nadler song.

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES PARTIALLY ERASED

D.A. Powell

First, it's just the faces disappearing.
Because, deflected, as the faces long have been,
with their hunched trunks
and mercilessly twisted necks,
they can only be regarded from a ground's-eye view.

The bellwort tips its fallow head down
in the hot tomato field. The green snake rests
beneath the green leaves, and the air is toast.
Diesel tractors grind to the frontage and idle there,
their heads bowed, too, like giant wooden horses
meant to sack an unsuspecting city.
Down come the earthen walls.

My father used to pour libations onto the ground
from the gas pump's nozzle, and I'd swirl
its iridescence, respire it into my lung's core,
so woozy, so sick, and awed by the vapors.
Fire beguiled me, too. As did the concept of force.

Whole villages burned in a single spritz.
Even now the past gets altered. We forget
because our friends won't suffer that subject again.
Because the students tap their pens uncomfortably,
look around to see if anyone else is taken in.
That's when we figure it's best to make a joke.

I've wandered, now, from the corrugated sheds,
with people half in and half out of nuclear range.
My retention of the facts is not a silo.
Even if it were, some disrepair gets fallen into.
I like to think we dismantle thought
as much as tortuous thought dismantles us.

I have seen sharp men lose limbs. Women too.
A hand pulled off, conveyed into the hopper.
But these were country matters.
Like frilled silhouettes of flowering wild carrot,
white against the mackerel white sky,
the texture is imperishable, the details

so far off. These bodies: their contours
uncertain. Just a general cast to the light.

No Layoff from This Condensery

I was going to write about how Occupy may not be dead but its death watch sucks, the return of King of Anarchists, the contests of who gets to say who's to blame that Occupy failed, who's anarchier than thou, I swear, if Corporate had a malicious sense of humor I could believe it kicked over the anthill just to watch the ants scramble to kill each other, but I've a delightful bleggal dilemma: I created a new category for the twelve hour overnight what-the-fuck posts that (more frequently than ever) appear then disappear, what do I do if people comment, as two (so far as I type this) did with last night's? Nothing demands more rigorous self-regulation than wanton what-the-fuckness in my universe: henchforth, any WTF12HRMAX post will be deleted in the morning unless it has received comments in which case it will be kept as will the WTF12HRMAX tag even though the post's lifespan exceeds the 12 hour maximum, though that night's header disappears. And yes, The Necks (and Lorine Niedecker) rule:

• Concerning Occupy and Black Bloc.
• Occupy prepares for what's next.
• The closest of strangers.
• The end of Wall Street as they knew it.
• Pied Cow cops.
• Greek fire.
• Nightmare without limits.
• New American way of war.
• Israel and proxy terrorism.
• Don' nobody deserve nuthin'.
• Pastor Sanctimonious violates his church's prohibitions on onanism.
• Hair of the dog that turned hair of the dog.
• Valentine's Day for bitchez.
• Beckett, for those of you who do.
• Beefheart festival? I'll play.
• Another new Chuck Prophet song.

Poet's Work

Lorine Niedecker

Grandfather
         advised me:
                   Learn a trade

I learned
          to sit at a desk
                    and condense

No layoff
          from this
                    condensery

Mndy Nght, Nw Ctgry, Lbm Cn't Stp Lstnng, Ndckr Pm

[THE RADIO TALK THIS MORNING]

Lorine Niedecker

The radio talk this morning
was of obliterating
the world

I notice fruit flies rise
from the rind
of the recommended
melon