The Ignorant Freedom of My Talking Mind

Saw Richard Thompson Electric Trio last night at Birchmere in Alexandria w Earthgirl and Planet and Air and Hamster. Some observations:

• I have been seeing Richard Thompson shows within 200 miles of home since the late 70s.
• I do not know though I suspect that, since I stopped following The Dead approx 1983, I have probably seen more RT shows than Dead shows meaning I've seen RT more than any one or any band.
• And I do love Thompson, was seeing him long before meeting Earthgirl, but he is also one of the very very very few musicians Earthgirl and I both love (people can vouch), so it's been a regular date for us for (holyfuck) twenty-nine years (three or so weeks from now being our 27th wedding anniversary).
• This year's Richard Thompson birthday post with my annual recitation of my favorite Richard Thompson story.
• It is true that my last decade of dedication lacks the vigor of the first 25 years, though that's as much a factor that over the last decade he has rarely toured with band, playing mostly solo acoustic shows.
• This is not a hard rule, but the acoustic tend more slower, with more ballads, and I prefer faster and less ballads.
• Dude can still play guitar.
• I will still go to electric Thompson shows, I no longer want to see solo acoustic, a point driven home about a third through the show when he did two solo acoustics, including the inevitable Vincent Black Lightning which, despite my not ever wanting to hear it again, almost everyone in the crowd wanted to hear.
• Tight band, Taras Prodaniuk on bass and backing vocals, Michael Jerome on drums and backing vocals.
• The dependably good Thai restaurant on Mt Vernon Ave which was the traditional before show dinner is now an Indian/Sri Lanka/Thai restaurant which not only sucks but suck slow, and we were the only people in the restaurant.
• Because the restaurant sucked slow we got to the show in the middle of the opening act, Just Another Motherfucking Mediocre Singer Songwriter, and the only seats left available were hard to the left of the stage.
• Because the seats were hard to the left of the stage I noticed that Thompson is wider and rounder than I thought, but aren't we all?
• Because the seats were hard to the left of the stage I was able to watch Thompson's picking hand from an angle I had never seen, and amazing.
• Because the seats were hard to the left of the stage I was able to watch the crowd. Understand, please, I am including myself in this next sentence: Know those PBS fund-raising programs of old rock-and-roll groups in concert in front of crowds of old fat white people?
• Thompson is well aware of the phenomenon if not the metaphor I choose, but he joked about it.
• Dude can still play guitar. I will still go to electric Thompson shows.
• Though not tonight at the Birchmere - the second night. Shows are expensive. Will try to find playlist tomorrow to see how much it differs. 
• Walked up to stage after Just Another Motherfucking Mediocre Singer Songwriter's set and snapped photo of RT's playlist:

• Empire's priorities.
• Hey, Mocomofos, Gazette shutting down. If it wasn't for the Gazette help-wanted ads I never would have got that after school job washing dishes at Arnold's Grill on Redland Road that I got unjustly fired from when accused of sneaking six-packs in the garbage to take from dumpster after work. That was Mickey Born. That I helped Mickey Born drink them afterward does not make me the thief.
• Today's self-dig at my life as accomplice to my complicity.
• Linguistic anxiety and the deconstruction of self in the realm of the ridiculous.
• You do understand that the better Sanders shows in the run-up the more valuable his inevitable endorsement of Inevitability is, yes?
• His & hers.
• The Peculiar Election. I've always considered Elizabeth Drew one of the smarter, fairer, Villagers.
• A public assembly facilities manager considers Jurassic Park.
• Skunkball! Congrats, Dave!
• Fawning Time.
• Why I hate reading Les Murray's poems, why it's important to read Les Murray's poems.
• For instance.
• Les Murray and the poetry of depression.
• Murray has nothing to do with the Thompson concert, but I'm reading Murray's poems while reading Vollmann's novels, and boom.
• The other Elizabeth Taylor.

THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

Les Murray

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

The Dog's Paws, Trotting, Rotate His End of Infinity

Does anyone reasonably believe Sarah Palin when she says:

There's nothing different today than there was in the last 43 years of my life since I first started reading. I continue to read all that I can get my hands on -- and reading biographies of, yes, Thatcher for instance, and of course Reagan and the John Adams letters, and I'm just thinking of a couple that are on my bedside, I go back to C.S. Lewis for inspiration, there's such a variety, because books have always been important in my life.

BWRTZ! If you didn't answer, It doesn't fucking matter whether it's bullshit, you're wrong.

There's nothing Palin can say or do that isn't breathlessly newsworthy. She has book deals, she gets a front page article in the NYT Sunday Magazine, she has Frank Rich the same day writing Oh Yes she can! She can command her price on speaker's fees. She can call Fox News and ask for face time whenever she wants on whatever topic she wants, she has Fox News as her publicist, marketer, and promoter. She's being paid for one-hour long campaign ads masquerading as a reality show. She's making gagagazillions more $$$ than everyone who reads this shitty blog combined times 10K.

Sure she's a hollow grifter, but stupid she's not. She was offered the Sarah Palin Decade and said yes. Her example is the carrot of our reeducation, especially the hollow grifter part, and here's the best part: every ounce of snarky-ass Liberal condescension towards Palin generates an ounce more profit for her (the very dynamic that boosted Obama's profits for every cracker attack on Obama's grifter hollowness - trust me, it worked on me).

Obama = Palin, grifters both, the black dude and the cracker woman, offered roles of a lifetime, smart enough to say yes. Palin didn't make me realize this, Obama did.

• RIP Chalmers Johnson.
• RIP Chalmers Johnson.
• Identifying evil.
• TSA and humiliating Americans. Remember, giving devout pinheads a pittance of power is a time-tested method of enforcing Corporate's preponderance of power. 
• Krugman still doesn't get it.
• On Krugman not getting it.
• America, soon.
• Jeb 2012?
• Angry gods.
• Are we high enough for this yet?
• Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege.
• Tubes allusion!
• PERE LEBRUN (thanks for the Kind!)
• Ehrlich rhymes with fuckstick.
• Liquor and politics in PG.
• Heh! -- Justin Bieber was just a kid when Eminem put out his first album. Today, he's still just a kid, but they're on equal footing at Sunday night's American Music Awards in Los Angeles as both vie for the title of entertainer of the year.
• Vapid celebrity. 

• Learning from Modernism.
• Les Murray.
• 101 favorite albums.
• Les Savy Fav.
• What if The Beatles never broke up?
• Full moon, empty heart. 
• UPDATE! Why the fuck is Soundgarden on my radio?
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Benjamin Britten was born 97 years ago today.

AURORA PRONE

Les Murray

The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
and the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.
Twilights broaden away from our feet too
as rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans
then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened
into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow
for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams.

Tusked the Balls-Biting Dog and Gutsed Him Wet

I heard David Broder died and scripted in my head easy if deserved scorn for America's Villagers, who will treat the tool's death as occasion for.... any number of petty, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing and self-justifying reasons, you know them too and don't need me to recite them. Plus someone else got there first, thank Bleegus.

Manning. A friend and I were emailing:

Him: I don't get at all the fetishization of the rules, for one. And the fetishization of contracts is always bizarre to me. And that there is a military jurisdiction outside of our normal rules and laws and set of rights is, in fact, part of the problem.

Me: As for fetishization with the rules, in a world going to hell when rules you live by are revealed as fraudulent, I wouldn't expect anything different. People are weird animals.

The more the lawlessness of the ruling class is revealed the more the ruling class will enforce the rules on their subjects. Beyond Manning's particular case, the majority response that he's getting just what he deserves is another example of the efficacy of the deliberate and continuing routinization of state brutality. The celebration of that brutality by those being trained to expect and accept it reiterates what fucking herd animals humans are.

• Correct.
• Record year for billionaires.
• The peasants are revolting.
• Totalitarian aesthetics.
• Duck, duck.... noose.
• Schwartz trademarks Grobama. Let me reiterate my claims to obamapostasy and obamapology, though the second hasn't been used here in months. 
• A lot of denial.
• Capital and the spectacle.
• Commence pigstorm in 3, 2, 1..... 
• I guess I've never cheated on my wife because I don't love my country enough.
• I could have hit Juan Williams crossing Mass Ave a month ago. Sorry.
• There are no accidents around here.
• Are you an anarchist? 
• Evidence of possibility.
• Snark aside, no surprise. 
• Cretinous hoaxsters.
• Metro!
• Sandy Spring!
• Automocoblogography.
• I only saw the first nine minutes (which sucks because United scored in the tenth) and the replay isn't archived yet as I type this Wednesday night, but looking at the line-up, Benny started Barklage at right back and brought in Kitchen as holding-mid late.

• Experimental champions. Second mention of Purdy in a week. 
• Ten best neglected literary classics? I spent a good part of one semester with the Gissing in a Victorian Studies class.
• Elizabeth Bishop's other art.
• Auto da Fe, part three. 
• Failure.
• Les Murray.
• The history of science fiction for those of you who do.
• Silliman's always generous lit-links.
• Hey!

• Give!
• Bowie, in photos.
• If this is the plan.
• The Wrens.
• A confederacy of solos.

PIGS

Les Murray

Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.
We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Nor the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.

Which Was Perhaps Immodest of Whoever I Am

CWCF I am, it may be my imagination but it feels like the burners under the rube soup have been turned down from a rolling boil to a ready simmer in the past week. Everything's quieter. Look at the sleeping blogrolls. Maybe it's exhaustion only, a catching of breath, resting the rubes before the also resting keepers begin boiling the rubes again in reaction to what the keepers can't control, boiling the rubes to try and control the rube-response best they can.

Yes, the weekly (not) paradigm-shifting OMFG! skipped this week, but is it me or has Corporate (in its own loosely coordinated and incompetently executed way) tamped the brakes on 24-7 rube-boiling, if only to catch its own breath and reorient before deciding (in its own loosely coordinated and incompetently executed way) how best next to raid grandma's kitchen pantry for ingredients for rube soup?

The simmering weirds me out. How strange to live in a world where a reduction in my boiling causes anxiety by an ominous calming of my happily agitated molecules.

• Greenwald and Silber on Drum. It's entirely possible to have faith in the judgment of Obama the politician while having zero faith in the judgment of Obama the moral agent.
• I hate motherfucking christers. Hate. I'm small this way.
• How much is too much. Yes, posted before, but put before my eyes again so put before yours again.
• Eternal punishment.
• What makes these people tick.
• The news from Japan.
• Tony Morrison could do that thing with her mouth.
• The most important thing about Libya is not in Libya.
• The perils of moralism.
• All war all the time.
• Someone wants a fatwa.
• New American Ghost Towns includes Oh So Shitty Maryland. 
• Bleggalgazing. There's a lot of that going on too.
• Speaking of blogrolls, there are a few new additions. Look.

• Les Murray.
• Burning man, part five.
• Spend three hours in the 60s?
• A sunset song.
• Cosmic cars.
• Theoretical girls.
• Gossip.
• Richard Thompson is 62 today.

FAME

Les Murray

We were at dinner in Soho
and the couple at the next table
rose to go. The woman paused to say
to me, I just wanted you to know
I have got all your cookbooks
and I swear by them!

I managed to answer her, Ma’am
they’ve done you nothing but good!
Which was perhaps immodest
of whoever I am.

The Point Comes When I Don't Know What It's Called

Saturday night ^

It's domain name renewal time. Everything at the account, billing information, auto-renewal, I made sure were accurate back in May in anticipation of this annual pain-in-the-blog. I get daily email telling me I'm losing the domain name and that payment can't be accepted. Every. Fucking. Day. Every. Fucking. Year. I have until July 1 to straighten them straighening this out.

If this blog disappears without a bleggalcide note, this is why. The same stupidass vanity that made me want the domain name is the same stupidass vanity that won't permit me to kill the shitty blog without a goodbye note.

Sunday morning:

• Appalachian Trail, Maryland, South Mountain, Gathland north to Lambs Knoll and back, w Earthgirl.
• Genocidal Culture Busker Haircut #19.
• You are living in a death cult.
• Roger's howl.
• The popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble.
• Why the Democratic Party loses.
• Why the Democratic Party sucks (Jon Schwarz interviews Ralph Nader).
• Trump in Monessen. My mother grew-up up the hill from Monessen.
• Top photo - Library, work.
• Reminder bleggalgaze:

• The real threat of AI.
• The end of cultural history?
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Crim King's Lead Hat, Inc.
• How do you draw a circle?
• These are the first signs of sonic attack.
• Words.
• I never foresaw the day I would read Franz Wright more than his dad, but it's here.
• Inside blegging: Yes, there was a Les Murray poem below once - I found it Friday, the original name of this post (you can see it in the URL) came from it - but then I posted the Franz Wright poem above and swapped out the Murray for the Wright. Fuck me.
• The slow secret death of the electric guitar?
• Time for an every ten years of so Breece D'J Pancake remembrance.
• I like Pancake's stories. It's the tidal wave of shitty rural-chic imitators that annoys.
• Found my The Knife stash, forget sometimes how much I love The Knife.

BLADE

Franz Wright

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake.

The Carrion-Stinking Dog Who Is Calf of Human and Wolf

First news story on DC's news/talk/radio station after turning on car to drive to work this morning news that four thoroughbred horses were tortured and murdered for human entertainment at Churchill Downs in the past week and I'm sideways and daydreaming of shooting people.

I've said this many times: I'm not interested in torture, I'd be quick and merciful, blammo, one bullet, in one ear and out the other. Carrion with my work, sideways. Related, I can't quit yellow and orange and pink. (UPDATE!) Not a balm much less salvation but mwah nonetheless, here's a new PJ Harvey song

MAGIC EIGHT BALL SAYS *NO!*
He will torture the rest of us until we agree to make him President to prove that there is nothing wrong with him
On the University of Crackerstan
The oceans are missing their rivers
SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT POLITICAL CAPITALISM
Shithole country: 10-year-old children found working at McDonald’s until 2 a.m.
Capitalism’s inherent predilection for excess
The fucksters who will steal your pension and 401K retirement savings
Big Ag wants to guarantee the carrion you eat (stop, you ghoul) comes from certified tortured and abused animals
I don't daydream of shooting you in one ear out the other because you buy and eat certified tortured and abused animals but for all that is fucking holy stop buying and eating tortured and abused animals, Beloveds, please
CORRUPTION PLAIN AND SIMPLE
New Jim O'Rourke!			Old PJ Harvey song				⤋

THE COWS ON KILLING DAY

Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,
that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy
of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky
that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

Raise One Eyebrow

Woke up with Throbbing Gristle in my head. Have spam from Poland

piecznie spośród budynku. Pagina personale esterna dell'autore... Trzymając się cienia zszedł po pochyłości podwórza. W pobliżu kostnicy zachował się tudzież rozejrzał dokoła, otworzył http://www.polskieslicznotki.waw.pl kolosalne, drewniane przejścia i wszedł wewnątrz.

Stosownie aż do charakteru pokoje panowała tędy głucha ani mru mru!. Saracen zapalił przestrzeń niezadrukowana. Przy bitwy poruszył luźno osadzonym w ścianie wyłącznikiem tudzież na podłogę posypały się kawałki tynku. W najsampierw.

Unfortunately my Polish colleague started her vacation today so I've no idea how I'm being praised or what's being sold (I've killed the link so if you copy/paste it and get a blue screen it's on you). In any case, that takes care of my required Labor Day Weekend bleggalgazing. Yes, Coil cascade up next.

• Once upon a time (2007, actually) Joe Biden's case that waging war without consent of congress is an impeachable act: Absolutely. I want to stand by that comment I made. The reason I made the comment was as a warning. I don't say those things lightly, Chris. you've known me for a long time. I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years. I teach separation of powers in Constitutional law. This is something I know. So I brought a group of Constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I'm going to deliver to the whole United States Senate pointing out that the president HAS NO CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY to take this country to war against a country of 70 million people unless we're attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him. The House obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him. The reason for my doing that -- and I don't say it lightly, I don't say it lightly.
• Nancy Pelosi urges bombing Syria.
• Jonathan Chait stamps foot, says Obama better not be lying this time or else.
• Miley Cyrus, Syria, war as consumer item.

• On Kindness.
• New to me: Marzanna Bogumila Kielar.
• On the Thomas Pynchon trail: Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six.
• Laziest literary link ever?
• Cyberpunk, for those of you who do.
• A distinction between scifi and fantasy, for those of you who do one or the other or both.
• RIP Seamus Heaney. I confess he never sang to me, which reminds me to speculate again (elsewhere, don't worry) why by and large contemporary non-American/Canadian English poetry, especially non-American/Canadian English poetry by men (Les Murray and Robin Robertson are the only two currently working poets whose new volumes I immediately seek out) doesn't sing to me. Suggestions on who to read pleaded for.
• New York lit circle Royal Rumble.

HOW TO BE A LAWYER

Jordan Davis

My father taught me how to play the beer bottle. It was Schlitz, and I was three or four. " You tuck your lower lip under, then blow air over the top of the bottle." I produced a tone, and we laughed. He paused. "You can make a different sound if there's less in the bottle," he said, motioning for me to take a sip. I did, then blew another note. We laughed again.

"Do you want to learn something else? Here's how to be a lawyer. Raise one eyebrow." I did so. "Good. Now hold it for a few seconds, turn to the jury, and say 'I see.'"

Even the Last Few, Weeks Off Yet, Misshapen as Toes

The tradition Egoslavian Joe Strummer, born 65 years ago today, birthday monologue:

Holyfuck, I love that song. One of my Clash stories: in 1982 Pete Townsend asked Strummer if The Clash wanted to open for The Who for stadium shows in support of the Who's It's Hard tour, and in September Blondie and me and Evinkay Kinnersay got in my green Ford Valiant and drove to JFK Stadium in Philly for the show. Good blotter was involved, just a quarter tab for me (I was driving after all), two full for Blondie, who knows how many for Evinkay, he was the provider, that and beer comprising his gas money. Blondie promptly disappeared into the stadium crowd after seeing one of the hundreds of thousands of best friends she had - this was her act; what charmed me was the once in a while she ditched others to be with me - and Kinner ran into a friend w/blow and disappeared (I was invited, but this is true, loved ones can vouch - blow never worked on me. Zip, zero. I'd tell people this and they would lay out $$$'s worth of lines and I'd say, you're wasting your money, and they'd dare me: they wasted their money) and I didn't see Blondie for two weeks or Kinner for three. I had a good jangle, my car keys, I didn't freak out, I got down near the front on the infield. I'd seen The Clash before, had seen them when they were on and into the show; they were neither on or into the show. Who fans booed them. Joe said, leaving the stage, Fuck You, Philadelphia.  

About Strummer: youngsters, The Clash were not the only band that mattered, but they did matter, and they were on the daily soundtrack once.

Here's Terre's tribute show from 2002 just after Strummer died.

Here's Diane's tribute show from 2002, just after Strummer died.

Lots of Clash at those two. When I put Strummer on the iPod now, it's the Mescalaros.

• On internet mobbings.
• I wrote more about this, and this is fuck it - Life in the Assholocene. 
• Various reason here and real life, I don't trust my bark's faith more than I normally don't trust my bark's faith, so I might bark less until I don't.
• Avedon's weekly links.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• The books we don't understand.
• Barking less means barking less, not less not music and poetry and not bark.  

THE BROAD-BEAN SERMON

Les Murray

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade

without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,

recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

  

Upright with water like men, square in stem-section

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,

kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

  

Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest

snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:

spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.

  

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find

plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later

you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight

  

appear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided,

thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,

beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

  

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers

in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice

that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

  

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or

do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality

like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

  

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string

and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,

the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers ...

  

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness

– it is your health – you vow to pick them all

even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

Unmelting Ice Everywhere

• Yes, much of this - I've added links since - posted briefly Friday morning. Was pulled down and a lengthy, as in vertically long, static was briefly posted. That was pulled down for the Egoslavian State of the Union.
• Photo through window of side door during January's snow storm, or: I was asked to join two friends Firday night for drinks and potusclusterfuck arguments. 
• The invitation came as I watched a looping gif of Hillary Clinton hugging a prop - a Latina child - HRC telling the prop to let HRC do the worrying.
• The contempt and revulsion I felt towards her shocked me.
• Planet flew home yesterday, she has an interview in Bawlmer on Monday, it's all very sudden. I picked her up at BWI at five and then the three of us ate at Ruan Thai and enjoyed a quiet night at home, so I didn't have to tell my friends: Sorry, I'm skipping tonight's potusclusterfuck pinting because I don't want to talk about my frightening contempt and revulsion at Hillary Clinton, thanks. 
• Though I would have if I'd had to.
• Let me repeat: my contempt and complete revulsion at Hillary Clinton, who is simply the current avatar of the team I stupidly worshiped for decades (UPDATE! Saturday night since tomorrow is an Egoslavian High Holy Day: Bill talking, same; Obama talking, always but especially now that he's a lame duck, trolling the right, fuck you much too), is cowardly transference of contempt and revulsion at me for decades of worshiping a team of Upper Management grifters.
• So I've learned nothing.

• Not even wrong.
• Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, cult of the microloan. 
• UPDATE! Periodic reminder my pro-Bernieness is based solely on his pissing off Clinton and Clinton supporters. Otherwise, he's -.06% less shitty than Clinton's -.06% less shittiness. 
• UPDATE! Saturday night (since Sunday is a High Egoslavian Holy Day): while driving Planet from airport we talked potusclusterfuck, at dinner the three of us talked potusclusterfuck, none of us like Clinton (Earthgirl almost as much as me, Planet catching up), all of us think Clinton will win potus.
• Bare life and the coming civil war.
• Why hasn't everything disappeared?
• Raiders' dawn.
• Iraq was better under Saddam.
• The environmental consequences of war.
• The Koch Brothers new brand.
• Donald Trump and the chance for a moral test.
• The reproach of hunger.
• This week in water.
• Was the internet worth it?
• Frances' article on Peltier.
• Gaddis.
• Why the hell did Ed buy Vollmann's Argall? 
• I finished Vollmann's Dying Grass. I don't do reviews. My favorite dream since Fathers and Crows. 
• I've not read anyone smarter on power. No one I've read understands assholes better - how they think, how they rationalize, how they moralize, how they operate, why they operate they way the do, and why they rule the world - than Vollmann.
• I can turn you on if I like and you ask nice.
• You are not obligated to finish a book I give you, though you are obligated to give it a fair chance.
• Yo La Tengo w Alvin Lucier!
• Kurtag born 90 years ago yesterday.

BOTTLES IN THE BOMBED CITY

Les Murray

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories

are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.

Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century   

and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget

now squares with another. If the word is Manchester

it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.

To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload

of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.

Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union   

of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up,

blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange,

umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel.

Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules.

When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.

The Carrion-Stinking Dog, Who Is Calf and Human and Wolf, Is Chasing and Eating Little Blood Things the Humans Scatter, and All Me Run Away, Over Smells, Toward the Sky

• Songs taken from last night's World of Echo (except for the Henry Wolff/Nancy Hemmings at very bottom - couldn't find the one Dave played but dug the one I found).
• Links while they're fresh.
• The Unknown Citizen.
• Drones and drama.
• There is not a foreign leader the NSA doesn't spy on.
• The UK Syria debate as seen by a rodent in Edinburgh.
• The issue isn't this particular episode of Middle East Clusterfuck, the issue is why every fucking actor in the Middle East keeps repeating the same fucking episode of Middle East Clusterfuck, the answer which we know. And will repeat forever, both the clusterfuck and rhetorical question and answer, amen.
• Formula.
• Steal this article.
• Tracking consumers: breaking kayfabe. One of my futile gestures of defiance: I'm buying less stuff.

• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• Maggie's weekend links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekend links.
• Inner peace.
• 5th birthday bleggalgaze.
• An American blogging on the third day of an American holiday weekend is especially stupid, both the blogging and the blogger.
• UPDATE! A comment in email from Anonymous! May I simply just say what a comfort to find
  somebody that really knows what they're discussing on the net. You definitely understand how to bring a problem to light and make it important. More people should check this out and understand this side of your story. I can't believe you are not more popular since you most certainly have the gift. Feel free to surf to my blog post; Penis Advantage Review () 
• Summer Chronograph series.
• Baseball stadium epiphany.
• What Seamus Heaney taught him.
• New Robert Coover short story.
• Prunella's latest playlist.
• I confess I hadn't thought about Bikini Kill or Le Tigre in a while. Cascade next cascade.

THE COWS ON KILLING DAY

Les Murray

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still   

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths   

that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.

One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,   

the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light   

and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.

Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human   

bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,   

big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,   

that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.

She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll   

and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.   

Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,   

licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human   

and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down

with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.   

Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky   

that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood   

in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree   

is with the human. It works in the neck of me

and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,

some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.

The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,   

is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,   

and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky. 

if you want don't let the revolution hold you back

• One friend, a government professor from Hilltop, I've mentioned his class a few times but I never Thursday Night Pinted with him so never used his B here
• more chord with than knot, us, boomers
• leftists who - get this - thought that New Deal, Great Society
• shit rad*
• B insisted since Trump's inauguration Democrats more paralyzed by data's failure in run-up to POTUS 2016
• all those brilliant new political scientists fluent in ARCgis by preschool and algorithimically programmed for heartless political Billy Ball from 2nd Grade, hatched from top Algorithm PhD rookeries 
• fucked their turd in 2016
• (it makes B smile, and, small, me too)
• He agrees with me that professional Democrats are corrupt despicable cowardly whores 
• but it's not fear of ruling, he says
• (or as I would put it, ruling is no longer in their job description at Overlord Headquarters)
• but analytical blindness *or* sight with no soul is sightlessness

Today's most important event:

Happy Birthday, Hamster! Hamster 6.0!

• Vital reminder
• *As in we honor those progressive accomplishment via the Democratic Party
• like we remember picnics with our grandparents
• Kübler-Ross and the Clusterfuck
• Ick condemns ick for ickiness
• Today's duhmost
• Fox Running
• Physics
• One last Les Murray link
• My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum
• Tomahawk
• Forrest Gander: Two Poetry-Films

EVERYTHING 'UNDER' THE SUN

Tom Raworth

a likely button of yes
immobilised

all 'over' the world
some radios are off and some are on

eat what you want
learn your lessons

if you want
don't let the revolution hold you back

Last Time I Fell in a Shower Room I Bled Like a Tumbril Dandy and the Hotel Longed to Be Rid of Me

Yes, motherfucking professional Democrats ratfucked and will continue ratfuck so this leftwingshit never fucking happens again, but blame Americans first, those who got theirs say go get yours you can't have any of mine

• I got Dr Sevrin ears
• Sanders. He will not be snuffed on October 1st with a 20 point lead
• a corpse walking beating him
• I've yodeled this on twaater: the coronavirus freakout hurt Sanders most, not a game-changer but not insignificant, in times of crisis humans seek out the shitlords they know
• More significant than Warren not endorsing him, Warren voters, fuck'em, each and every one of them, more fraud than she is and she's a motherfucking professional Democrat
• As ye sow, Joe shall reap
• Already setting you up to be blamed when Trump wins steals whatever the election
• Damn, my Robinhood is fucked
• Left behind: suicidal America
• Digital infantilism
• The trolls of academe
• Humans are morons
• of slimmer chances when washing hands
• Query letter (Jim, look at this, you've been here, I think)

VERTIGO

Les Murray

Last time I fell in a shower room

I bled like a tumbril dandy

and the hotel longed to be rid of me.

Taken to the town clinic, I

described how I tripped on a steel rim

and found my head in the wardrobe.

Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged

I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled,

wishing the grab-bar of age might

be bolted to all civilization

and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill

heaped up out of broken amphorae.

    

When, anytime after sixty,

or anytime before, you stumble

over two stairs and club your forehead

on rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums,

that’s the time to call the purveyor

of steel pipe and indoor railings,

and soon you’ll be grasping up landings

having left your balance in the car

from which please God you’ll never

see the launchway of tires off a brink.

Later comes the sunny day when

street detail whitens blindly to mauve

   

and people hurry you, or wait, quiet.