The Kin of Charity Is Whore

Two paragraphs that capture America 7/31/11 on multiple levels:

Maybe it is the spiraling cost of food in a tough economy or the logical next step in the movement to eat locally. Whatever the reason, New Yorkers are increasingly fanning out across the city’s parks to hunt and gather edible wild plants, like mushrooms, American ginger and elderberries.

Now parks officials want them to stop. New York’s public lands are not a communal pantry, they say. In recent months, the city has stepped up training of park rangers and enforcement-patrol officers, directing them to keep an eye out for foragers and chase them off.

Daily Gaddis:

 - Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. - Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they're so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different..

Also, in The Recognitions, I'd forgotten the phrase "inherent vice" is an art term, particularly relevant to forgers, that refers to the inevitable degradation of a paint, said degradation used as a method of detecting forgeries, when I read this in a couple of years ago, whose author surely was aware of the meaning when naming his novel, and which I'll remember when I reread the novel in two or three years.

• Thought experiment: If Obama truly believes in his mission to transcend bipartisanship, that his mission in noble in intent and honorable in execution, what does a 40% approval rating say about America today?
• War and the true tragedy of the commons.
• Cost of war. War is the only thing keeping the economy from collapsing. 
• The war on you.
• This is about breaking the crackers.
• Grumbling. That'll learn him.
• Why voters tune out Democrats.
• It's people like the Second Shittiest Human in the World that keep me returning to the salt lick of .06% less shitty (and daydreaming of applying a shovel to her head).
• Your Fucking Washington Post's motherfucking ombudsman motherfucking defends the motherfucking Second Shittiest Human in the World.
• Faith in the system.
• The market and class power.
• Reality as failed state.
• The ongoing chemistry experiment.
• I'll tell you what it means: nobody likes a pussy, and think, nature or nurture?
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
• Scrutinize Fox?
• Motherfucking cracker.
• In defense of cultural marxism.
• What passes for a method. 
• Chapter Six. For the record, I've never been to New Zealand.
• Poetry and politics: Poetry and politics share at least two uses of comparison: one serves an expansionary vision of the world, the other, retrenchment. Both understand the limits of comparison, but the first treats these deferentially, as part of a strategy to bring to mind differences among forms of experience. The second develops self-consciously false, totalizing comparisons among dissimilar things, even as it decries inappropriate comparisons when employed by antagonists. Ironically, both the U.S. political right and some leftist poets at times employ the second strategy, although for opposite goals. The Tea Party’s success in claiming the national midterm debate relied in part on this world-obliterating rhetoric. But it might be the first that better supports action by the left, not because it is tentative but because it imagines that readers may set down the poem and see.
• On the above.
• I flatter myself the role of poet is canary, weathervane, Cassandra, fool.
• Gaddis interview.

ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE

Heather McHugh

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

San Jose 0, United 2

Imagine if United could win at home.

Remember when Metros traded Dwayne DeRossario to United for Dax McCarty? Idiots!

Confession: all I've seen is the highlights - I went to bed, guaranteeing a United victory (it'd've been a 0-0 draw if I'd stayed up to watch). You're welcome.

Next two games at home against the worst two teams in the league. It's hyperbole to say but hyperbole is what I do: making the playoffs requires six points out of the two for more reasons than just the points.

Yay! This guy blogs the game and puts this in my head, where it was waiting.

Fifty-Three Today

Hounds of Love has to be one of my three most listened to albums, and the song cycle of side two back in the days of album sides unquestionably the side of music I've listened to most. Dream of Sheep and Under Ice and Waking the Witch and Watching You Without Me and Jig of Life and Hello Earth and finishing with, and you must listen in order like I just did for full kaboom, holyfuck, I love this song:







The line between loving the music and loving the memories the music evokes (and there are ten formative years and three exceptional women when Kate Bush was on the daily soundtrack) has long blurred, but she's one of five in my sillyass desert island game for both reasons.

It Hurts, This Wanting to Give a Dimension to Life When Life Is Precisely That Dimension

Holyfuck, I've the first comprehensively vile mood I've had in months, so fuck it, I'll be damned if I'm not going to enjoy it.

• Bleggalgazing: There is another factor at play in the recent dearth of posting: the inherent difficulty of saying anything meaningful about a political world that has become almost totally hallucinatory. This is currently being exemplified by the debt-ceiling “crisis.” Every single element of the public presentation of this “crisis” is transparently, even brazenly false. It is obvious – even to many of our ever-somnolent Establishment commentators – that the situation is an entirely manufactured crisis designed solely to impose shock-doctrine “austerity” on the American system, thus completing its long, painful mutation into a neo-feudal oligarchy backed by a militarist police state.
• There is no lesser evilism.
• On what do we depend?
• World Shittiest Human tells crackers to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
• Motherfucking christers. Here's the motherfucker's email address: WesScroggins@MissouriState.edu. Don't actually write him, just have a pleasant thirty seconds daydreaming about it.
• Yes, I realize Corporate plays me off this motherfucking christer to keep us from acknowledging what we agree upon and combining against Corporate, but what the fuck am I going to say to this fucker and his imaginary friend Fascist Jesus?
• Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.

• Blog Days of Summer or not, our stringtown in Blegsylvania be dead.
• Solar anus.
• Annihilating angel.
• Mouth end of the animal.
• Outrageous.

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

Eighty-Four Yesterday

HOTEL LAUTREAUMONT

John Ashbery


1.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society
working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.
We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of
     Usher’s Well.”

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.
The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of
     Usher’s Well,”
or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds
the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,
or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.
In any case the ruling was long overdue.
Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.

2.

In any case, the ruling was long overdue.
The people are beside themselves with rapture
so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure
and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The people are beside themselves with rapture
yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,
and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.
In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.
Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,
and night like black swansdown settles on the city.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

3.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.
Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.
If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,
when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.
And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us
small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.
All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.
It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

4.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.
Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,
to end the standoff that history long ago began.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open
but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
To end the standoff that history long ago began
must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.
You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?
Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.
Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;
only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:
The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

STILL LIFE WITH STRANGER

Come on, Ulrich, the great octagon
of the sky is passing over us.
Soon the world will have moved on.
Your love affair, what is it
but a tempest in a teapot?

But such storms exude strange
resonance: the power of the Almighty
reduced to its infinitesimal root
hangs like the chant of bees,
the milky drooping leaves of the birch
on a windless autumn day -

Call these phenomena or pinpoints,
remote as the glittering trash of heaven,
yet the monstrous frame remains,
filling with regret, with straw,
or on another level with the quick grace
of the singing, falling snow.

You are good at persuading
them to sing with you.
Above you, horses graze forgetting
daylight inside the barn.

Creeper dangles against rock-face.
Pointed roofs bear witness.
The whole cast of characters is imaginary
now, but up ahead, in shadows, the past waits.

Finally, Good News! (UPDATED!)

Stubborn, unimaginative, cautious, dull, goodbye.

Bob Bradley signed on for a second cycle as U.S. national team head coach a little less than a year ago, but that term has prematurely come to a close.

Bradley has been relieved of his duties, the U.S. Soccer Federation announced on Thursday. The decision to let Bradley go comes after a meeting at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., between Bradley, federation president Sunil Gulati, and U.S. Soccer CEO Dan Flynn.

No ideas on who should replace him, just glad he's gone, especially this early into the next World Cup timetable, especially with so much youth needing development.

Today's a High Holy Day, but between today's early arrgh and this sudden good news - I was about to post the tribute when the Bradley news broke - his birthday will be celebrated in tomorrow's post, though don't confuse that birthday with Saturday's High Holy Day.

UPDATE!

Cause and effect. Thanks!

UPDATE!

A list of potential replacements! which includes the guy above!

• Freddy Adu -- Staying with the player/coach theme, now that The Adu is back, just put him in charge of everything. He has a good 45 years of experience in the game at this point.
• Abby Wambach -- Maybe it's time someone from the more successful women's side shows the U.S. men how it's done. She's already been named player/coach for her WPS team. Natural progression.
• Chicharito -- Just to make some heads explode. Also because he can score more from the touchline than most USMNT players can from inside the box.
• Rafa Benitez -- He's been unemployed for a while now, so someone has to take pity on him. Plus, not having to go against Alex Ferguson will make him 87 percent more sane. FACT.
• Timber Joey -- Hey, he has a chainsaw.
• Maradona -- You know you want it.

USSF doesn't have to decide tomorrow. That's the MAJOR BENEFIT of firing Bob Bradley now.

I wonder what Michael Bradley is thinking.

A Man Was Sad—for Himself, Maybe for Someone Else, Maybe He Had Lost Something, or Someone—So He Hired Some Workmen to Erect a Monument

I've fought off writing this for months, and the friend of a friend's question last weekend re: why blog? makes the itching worse, so fuck it, I'm tired of scratching and I won't stop scratching until I scourge myself and I might as scourge myself during the Blog Days of Summer. Normally I'd wait for a Saturday, the slowest day of the blog week, but this Saturday is a High Holy Day, so today.

Psst, I'm an attention whore. Yes, there's blogwhoring in posting links to other bloggers. I believe I link primarily to give like-minded and Kind people interesting things to think about, listen to, and giggle over, but if that was the only reason I need remove my statcounters and disable comments, and fuck that.

Yesterday I linked to a new addition to one of the Becauses; in the other Because a blog that'd been comatose for half a year awoke and rose like a floater to the top of the blogroll. Some of you pinged one or both of them, and both of the owners, blogwhores like me, came here and after one motherfucking second each decided this blog is unworthy of their motherfucking eyes.

It's true! Lots of people, upon first visit, look around and decide this blog sucks, and - fuck me - that's OK.  Many people in real life like me lots or dislike me intensely after spending a few minutes with me. That's who I am. I like to be liked but don't worry the hate. That's true too of this blog.

This isn't about making blogrolls (though thank you for the Kind), this isn't about pings: blogrolls are signs of respect and community. Blogrolls don't produce pings except from regular readers who use them like bookmarks. I get a half-dozen pings off unfamiliar blogrolls in a good year, and - here's the aargh - when I go and look at that unfamiliar blog I take more than a motherfucking second before deciding if it's motherfucking worthy. That's just motherfucking Kindness and courtesy.

Ah, better. Past experience suggests another bloglava eruption around the new year, but shit, I'm just a motherfucking amateur fraud who still can't help requiring my own bullshit meet a certain standard of bullshit, unlike this fat brilliantly fraudulent bastard, the greatest con-man of his generation:







Daily Gaddis:

 - You write a novel? Who'll read a novel with no women in it?
 - But baby, there will be, I'll do it just like Proust did, write about it simply everyone I know and then just go through and change boy's names to girls, I know the perfect Odette...
 - You ought to go back to analysis. Or have a vagotomy and get it over with. Just because your analyst killed himself...
 - He didn't kill himself, it was an accident.
 - An accident? He ties a rope around his neck and climbs out a window, but the rope breaks and he falls forty-six stories, so it's an accident?

• (Zizek h/t Biblioklept) See, the Nazis in Sound of Music represent cosmopolitan Jews.
• This is about breaking the motherfucking crackers.
• Crackertacular!
• Crash Club.
• Talking about the young folks.
• Worse president ever?
• No, fuck you.
• How America could collapse.
• Christer terrorism.
• On the above.
• Remember that whole oil spill in the Gulf thingee?
• High Holy Day this Saturday.
• I should have known better.

INTERNAL MONUMENT

G.C. Waldrep

A man was sad—for himself, maybe for someone else, maybe he had lost something, or someone—so he hired some workmen to erect a monument. He was not surprised when they came calling early one morning, while he was still in bed, but he was surprised when, with a practiced slash, the foreman opened his chest. "We build the monument inside," the foreman said. "But who will see the monument?" the man protested. "It's a monument for feeling, not for seeing," the foreman replied.

The operation was unpleasant but was soon over. And sure enough, after a brief interval of recuperation, the man felt, he thought, a little less sad than before.
This lasted a while, but then he felt the sadness returning, in spite of the dark, heavy space in his chest where the monument rested, nestled in flesh. He called the workmen again. They obligingly came and repeated the procedure.

Over the ensuing months and years, the man had cause to call upon the foreman and his crew repeatedly, as new life brought new losses, new sadnesses. His chest became a jumbled cabinet of monuments, the fatty tissue of his upper arms and thighs, his bowels: even his fingers and toes felt weighed down by his commemorations. At length, it was all he could do to lift the telephone receiver at his bedside. He called the foreman. "I can't get up," he said. "I can't even move." "An unfortunate side effect," the foreman told him. "Really, there's nothing we can do."

Bedridden, the man felt deprived even of what had been the most mundane pleasures of daily life: strolls down the avenue, the smell of bread baking at a neighborhood patisserie, autumn leaves. It was not turning out at all as he had expected, this life.

Inside his body the monuments huddled. Mutely, he thought, though sometimes, late at night, when he tried to shift position, they brushed against one another and made what could only be called sounds, though no one else could hear them, and he heard them, if he heard them, with his body, rather than with his ears.

When the man died, his landlord, his executors, eventually the city authorities all attempted to wrest his body from what had become his deathbed. No one could move it. Finally, they called the foreman, who agreed to try one last procedure on the corpse.

The foreman unzipped the body like a flimsy valise and, with the assistance of his workmen, slowly, carefully turned it inside out. Now everyone could see the monuments, but no one could see the man.

They were beautiful, his monuments. People traveled into the city from miles around to view them. The city graded and graveled lanes in what had been the sad man's body. Clerks and engineers began to take their families there for picnics. A bandstand was built. Lovers gathered at dusk for concerts and, later, laid out blankets on the generous lawns, over which the monuments stood like sentinels. "Look at the stars," the lovers whispered to one another. "Look up at the beautiful stars."

You Have to Get Over the Shattered Autos in the Backwoods Lot to that Bridge in the Darkness Where the Sentinels Stand Guarding the Border with Their Half-Slung Rifles, Warned of the Likes of You

Sure, who, Fleabus?  Find me the honest broker who passes your sniff test re: Corporate whore and can run successfully against Corporate needing Corporate's help to confront Corporate, thus another Corporate whore. We're all whores. My whore's are older, fatter, lazier but just as craven in exact proportion to me.

O! this: You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will. Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready, though it'll be ready before he loses his naivete and understands why Corporate values his employment.

Meanwhile, new excellent if self-derivative Corporate whoring from Bjork:

• High Holy Day this Saturday.
• Sure. Who?
• Deceit.
• Scare tactics.
• Obamadick and the Left.
• Obama as James Buchanan: (Buchanan's) nevertheless commonly regarded as one of the worst Presidents in American history because of the way he chose to deal with the deepening crisis over slavery, states’ rights and secession. He entered office determined to broker a lasting compromise between the two sides, positioning himself as an uncommitted, neutral figure who could be a trustworthy arbiter. That stance ended up infuriating almost everyone involved in the conflict.
• The paradoxes of hope. 
• Eric Schneiderman is the Left's best hope?
• An economy destroyed.
• Selling America short.
• So this is despair.
• Corporate got to Cantor.
• This. I have a neighbor, elderly, votes Pig, signs in yard and all, told me a couple of  weeks ago Social Security is gonna destroy this country. I said, so you refuse to cash your checks, right? Hasn't talked to me since. Fucking pigs.
• Things you might have missed.
• Wanting for something to do.
• Perspective.

Today's Gaddis:

 - You don't paint? You don't paint pictures yourself?

 - I... no.

 - Why not?

 - I just... don't paint.

 - Recktall Brown watched him wipe his perspiring forehead, and drink part of the brandy quickly. - All this work, all these books, you go to all this trouble just to patch up other people's work? How come you've never painted anything yourself?

 - Well, I have, I have.

 - What happened, you couldn't sell them?

 - Well, no, but...

 - Why not?

 - Well people.... the critics... I was young then, I was still young.

 - What are you now, about forty?

 - Forty? Me, forty?

 - Why not, you look forty. He took a cigar from his pocket, and continued his gaze at the man across from him. - So they didn't like your pictures. What happened, the critics laugh you out of town?

 - Well they....

 - And you got bitter because nobody gave your genius any credit.

 - No, I...

 - And you couldn't make any money on them, so you quit?

 - No, it...

 - And you decided the only thing you could do was patch up other people's pictures.

 - No, damn it, I....

 - Don't get mad, I'm just asking you.

• All Fleabus photos by Planet, yo. 
• Cats are great. I realize ours aren't truly ferals anymore. Napoleon is ours, Creamy's made reappearances (she shows up in harsh weather), Frankie's a moron on wants to be pet but is to wussy to let us, and even Momcat is now walking towards us when she's hungry. All disappear for days, weeks at a time but all come home. Napoleon is the leanest, healthiest cat who's ever owned me.
• Also at the above link, in comments I put a song into your head since it was put in mine.
• Flavorful mechanics.
• Yes, I know I'm not worthy.
• It rarely occurs to us to go to Silver Spring.
• High Holy Day this Saturday.
• I've read preciselyall of zero of this year's Mann Booker long list.
• Josipovici, for those of you who do.
• Writer's block.
• Cocteau Twins meet Dead Can Dance.
• THE GLANDS! Seriously, I love The Glands.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO GET OVER

Dick Allen

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,

the blue one, especially.

Your first love rounding a corner,

that snowy minefield.

Whether you step lightly or heavily,

you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance

before evening falls,

letting no one see you wend your way,

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,

meaning “to proceed, to journey,

to travel from one place to another,”

as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

You have to get over your resentments,

the sun in the morning and the moon at night,

all those shadows of yourself you left behind

on odd little tables.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to

cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan,

crawl over this ego or that eros,

then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.

Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning

“that indicated place, somewhere generally seen

or just beyond sight.” If you would recover,

you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot

to that bridge in the darkness

where the sentinels stand

guarding the border with their half-slung rifles,

warned of the likes of you. 

Sadness of Just-Painted Rooms

As I type this paragraph it's an hour and a half before Obamadick speaks to the nation on the most important crisis of our lifetime since the last one until the next. I'm not going to watch, and it occurs to me that I have not watched a live feed or video of Obama making a speech, giving a presser, answering a rehearsed off-the-cuff in at least a year. I have heard his voice in the car on the radio, and with a quick STFU, motherfucker, changed the station.

OK, so I listened three minutes, Obamadick plucking pwoggle harps, billionaires versus grandmas, greed versus fairness. He was dreamy.

This isn't about breaking you, sweet dumb broken obamapologist, this is about breaking the motherfucking crackers who (have more leverage than you, you sweet dumb broken obamapologist, will ever have again in your lifetime) who (dress up in wool in 120 degrees and play Civil War at Bull Run, the fucking crackers) who truly believe they are revolutionaries, not the motherfucking Corporate sappers they are.

O! I was asked to bleggalgaze from both the likeliest and unlikeliest of sources, and again I defer to Gaddis, who modeled, think about this, Otto off of....

 - Chr-ah-st. Otto. I mean what are you doing standing in the middle of the street writing a note?

 - Oh, Ed, I.... it's just something I thought of for this play I'm working on.

 - A play? Chrahst, how unnecessary. Who's in it, asked Ed, who, though he didn't know it, was himself in the play, with the unlikely name of Max.

 - Well, no one yet, Otto said, returning to his pocket the slip of paper on which he had just written: Gordon says nt mke thngs explict whch shd be implict ie frndshp. - I haven't finished it. The plot still needs a little tightening up. (By this Otto meant that a plot of some sort had yet to be supplied, to motivate the series of monologues in which Gordon, a figure who resembled Otto at his better moments, and whom he greatly admired, said thing which Otto overheard, or thought of too late to say.)

• UPDATE! High Holy Day this Saturday.
• More bleggal overlord arguing the semantics of neo-liberalism.
• Laughing at the people of Wal-Mart.
• On crackers.
• UPDATE! On slamming crackers.
• Fuckers.
• Republicans are pigs.
• Jesusfuck, this pig want's Krauthammer's job.
• Obamapologist.
• Speak roughly to your little boy.
• Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. 
• UPDATE! High Holy Day this Saturday.
• Butt slasher strikes again.
• My future hell.
• Dear Wayne, I've been humiliated.
• A taxonomy of sound poetry.
• UPDATE! High Holy Day this Saturday.
• Squelching, farting: defending The Who. I like The Who. I loved them once, I suppose. Stopped listening and never went back, not sure why.
• Suddenly the Darkness.
• Another day of dread.
• I see a darkness.
• Hey! look who I've tickets to see in October at Birchmere with Earthgirl and Hamster! Hint, this is one of my five favorite songs ever, really:

BUSHWICK: FLAT LATEX

D. Nurkse

Sadness of just-painted rooms.   

We clean our tools   

meticulously, as if currying horses:   

the little nervous sash brush   

to be combed and primped,   

the fat old four-inchers   

that lap up space   

to be wrapped and groomed,   

the ceiling rollers,   

the little pencils   

that cover nailheads   

with oak gloss,   

to be counted and packed:   

camped on our dropsheets   

we stare across gleaming floors   

at the door and beyond it   

the old city full of old rumors   

of conspiracies, gunshots, market crashes:   

with a little mallet   

we tap our lids closed,   

holding our breath, holding our lives   

in suspension for a moment:   

an extra drop will ruin everything.

Perhaps, in the Exaggerated Grace of His Weight Settling, the Wings Raised, Held in Strike-or-Embrace Position, I Recognized Something More than Swan

A friend of a friend asked yesterday, why do I blog, what does it do for me, what do I hope to accomplish, saying before I could answer she can't imagine herself blogging, doesn't understand why people do. Neither do I, I said truthfully, then awkwardly said nothing until my friend changed the subject.

Here's Gaddis:

And then... is it possible? can a man be jealous of himself? Damn it, listen Esther, did you see what she tried to do? she almost kissed me goodbye? Why, she's insane. But she goes out on the street and nobody's surprised to see her, she talks and nobody's surprised to hear her. It's suffocating. Right this minute, she's talking. They're down there right this minute and that woman with the granulated eyelids is talking. You look up and there she is, people... the instant you look at them they begin to talk, automatically, they take it for granted that you understand them, that you recognize them, that they have something to say to you, and you have to wait, you have to pretend to listen, pretend you don't know what's coming next while they go right on talking with no idea what they're talking about, they don't even know but they go right on, trying to explain who they are because they take it for granted you want to know, not that they have the damnedest idea as far as that goes, they just want to know what kind of receptacle you'll be for their confidences. How do they know I'm the same person that... Who are they to presume such intimacy, to... go right on talking. And they really believe they're talking to me!

I hate thinking about these questions so much I think about them constantly, as regular readers, rolling their eyes, can attest, but don't worry, that's it but to note it's not aargh or angst or even weary, it's the motherfucking Blog Days of Summer and, Hey! have you heard the story Obama and the Clusterfuck yet? More importantly, I'm rereading a novel like it's the first time, I'm remembering how much I once loved reading novels, so maybe more of Gaddis and less of me until it's not.

O! On bleggalgazing: some new sites on both blegrells Because, thanks as always for the Kind, if you're Kinding me and me not you let me know, and this:

• And now, the final indignities.
• Fear-mongering and freedom.
• He doesn't want to.
• A pussy and an asshole.
• Open letter to registered Democrats.
• Radical, but useless.
• Getting out of the game.
• Despite the use of a motherfucking Nine Inch Nails lyric, which certainly undermines the credibility of the author, this column is worth reading.
• Motherfucking crackers.
• The sleep of reason.
• If your website is full of assholes it's your fault.
• Fuck-me-jig. Never happen.
• Partied here often thirty years ago.
• Lonely days.
• You pretend to be the moon.
• Return of Darkblack's Sunday Overnight!
• How to get laid in Japanese.
• Triadic Memories. Holyfuck.

LEDA, AFTER THE SWAN

Carl Phillips

Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,

the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,

I recognized
something more
than swan, I can't say.

There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,

and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down

to the heat-crippled field,

ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,

and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere--

then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.

One Can Only Conclude that Such Impelling Concupiscence Serves as a Species' Life-Insurance

Early in The Recognitions Gaddis uses a word I'd forgot, mithridatism, to reference in particular Reverend Gwyon's alcoholism but more generally his self-protective bafflement ("he had, by now, the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before") over... everything:

He was called back to the Seminary for a refresher course, and it was at that time that he developed a taste for schnopps, and started the course of mithridatism which was to serve him so well in his later years.

Ding! if not in the particular than the general. Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?

It's true! and I didn't go, I feel no obligation to attend a friendly under any circumstances much less in an oven. I was pleased to read (the game was on Fox, but I felt no obligation to watch a friendly just because it's on TV) St Benny took the chance to play Jakovic next to McDonald in a game that meant nothing, displeased to read United still can't win a fucking home game, even if it is just a friendly.

Jesusfuck, those red kits are hideous.

Hey! speaking of friendlies I feel no obligation to attend, I have four tickets to Manchester United v Barcelona at the hell hole known as Fed/Ex Field this coming Saturday night, July 30, that SeatSix, Landru, Ilse, and myself have the common sense not to use. Want them? Their yours! I don't have a parking pass so you'll have to suck Danny's parking ransom (and beer and food ransom once inside), but you can have the motherfucking tickets for a thank you and the digital promise of a friendly pint someday. I can email them to you.

• Seriously, when you heard there were coordinated terrorist attacks in Norway, you didn't think it was a Norwegian cracker/christer(s)? I live just outside the Beltway and work at a potential terrorist target two miles from The White House, I think I'm more likely to be killed by an American cracker/christer than a Muslim.
• Actually, I think I'm most likely to be killed by Corporate.
• It's 99% probable the guy is fucking pathologically nuts and his only agenda that he's fucking pathologically nuts, but you know, what drives motherfucking cracker/christers NUTS about Muslim terrorism, especially suicide bombers, is envy.
• Still, yes, it is every bit as bigoted of me to assume it was a motherfucking Norwegian cracker/christer as it was for everyone who assumed it was an attack by Muslims.
• Not that Corporate media will make that admission.
• On the above.
• Everything you need to know.
• Yes, I recognize Salon is Corporate too. Jeez.
• Kill Muslims anyway.
• On resistance. It is my ego getting in the way - since whatever I do is minuscule in the scheme of things I don't do anything. Working on it.
• Where did that $2.5 trillion surplus go?
• Dead Souls. 
• Why, this would be Leftist social engineering and an attack against individual freedoms! 
• The second Reagan revolution, cont....
• A Mormon and a wetback? This is as relevant to why Mitt Romney should or not be POTUS as Michelle Bachmann's gender.
• Narcissism of the learned.
• A blog re-boots.
• Beat of Love.
• Drive blind.
• It was waking up with the song below in my head that put the flashback above in my head:

UNNATURAL SELECTIONS: A MEDITATION UPON WATCHING A BULLFROG FUCKING A ROCK

Jim Dodge

Amalgam of electric jelly, 
constellated neural knots 
in the briny binary soup, 
as surely as stimulus prods response 
brains are made to choose. 
And through a major error in pattern recognition 
or a significant cognitive fault, 
the bullfrogs brain has selected 
a two-pound rock
as the object of his rampant affection, 
a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye) 
that neither resembles
nor even vaguely suggests 
the female of his species.

He does seem to be enjoying himself 
in a blunted sort of way, 
but since the rock so obviously remains unmoved
one suspects it's not the blending of sweet oblivions 
that fuels his persistence, 
but a serious kink in a feedback loop-- 
or perhaps just kinkiness in general. 
The less compassionate might even call him 
the quintessentially insensitive male.

Assuming a pan-species gender bond 
and a common fret, 
I advise my amphibious pal, 
"Hey, I don't think she's playing hard to get.
That's the literal case you're up against, Jack--
true story, buddy; stone fact.
And I'd be fraternally remiss if I didn't share 
my deep and eminently reasonable doubt 
that she'll be worn down
however long and spectacular the ardor."

Ignoring my counsel
as completely as he has my presence,
the bullfrog continues his fruitless assault 
with that brain-locked commitment to folly
which invariably accompanies 
dumb, bug-eyed lust.

But, in fairness, 
whose brain hasn't shorted out in a slosh of hormones
or, igniting like a shattered jug of gas,
fireballed into a howling maelstrom 
where a rock indeed might seem a port? 
One can only conclude
that such impelling concupiscence
serves as a species' life-insurance, 
sort of a procreative override 
of any decision requiring thought, 
thought being notoriously prey to thinking, 
and the more one thinks about thinking 
the thinkier it gets.
Therefore, though the brain is made to choose, 
its very existence ultimately depends 
on the generative supremacy of brainless desire--
for with all respect to Monsieur Descartes 
you am before you can think you are. 
Dirt-drive compulsions riding powerful desires
render any choice moot, along with 
reason, morality, taste, manners, 
and all those other jars of glitter 
we pour on the sticky and raw.

The hard truth is we never chose to choose:
not the brains we use to pick
between competing explanations for our sexual mess
nor these hearts we've burdened with our blunders 
in the name of love.
Do whatever we decide we will, 
the choice isn't free;
we live at the mercy of more pressing needs.

Thus, urges urgently surging, 
we mount a few rocks by mistake.
A bit more embarrassing than most of our foolishness, true--
but so what?
The power of the imperative 
coupled with the law of averages 
virtually guarantees enough will get it right 
to make more brains to be made up 
about exactly what steps to take 
toward what we think we need to do 
on this stony journey between delusion and mirage--
when to move, where to hide our dreams-- 
a journey where we finally learn 
freedom is not a choice 
a brain is free to choose.

Fortunately, my warty friend,
the soul is built to cruise.

imagine the very first marriage a girl and boy trembling with some inchoate need for ceremony a desire for witness

I caught myself writing like I promised myself I wouldn't, like I don't want to and probably can't anymore. There's lots of provocative thoughts in the links and their comments below. I'm still synthesizing them; thank you sincerely for making me think, but holyfuck, looking in tablet I'm reminded it's best to sometimes do it off-blog. Not that I'll ever find answers there, just inchoate incoherence always.

But my daughter will be twenty-seven in 2020. Tell me, should we assume nine more years of Corporate's serbianizing of America? Tell me, what are Corporate's real issues and what idiot-like-me chum am I fed in the run-up to that election? Is everything the same, just worse, progressed inexorably along the teleological trajectory you foresee today? Resistance? Who to what and how?

She'll be thirty-nine in 2032. Tell me.

• I don't see Corporate not fighting to the death, do you?
• Not funny, not clever, not your girlfriend.
• I would give $100 just to imagine pissing off Obamadick, but who? I say this all the fucking time: there's no money to be made demagoguing from the Left? 
• And yes, Old-Timers, it has been awhile since I used the "old-girl friend who chained herself to virgin forest trees who used the tug-of-rope argument for obviously far spectrum politics." I caught myself using it in tablet; hence this post's first paragraph. 
• UPDATE! BTW, I meant to say that my first reaction to the Norway terrorist attacks was that it was a motherfucking Norwegian cracker/christer who hates Norwegian "socialism," but I'm just a leftwing elitist bigot.
• I tried hard to betray you and the Republicans wouldn't let me.
• I linked to Dear Progressives a couple of days and 172 comments ago.
• Good luck.
• An obamapologist drowning in an inch of water.
• Your motherfucking president.
• Occupy Wall Street?
• Daily doh.
• Elizabeth Warren makes it personal, chooses wrong target. 
• Jennifer Rubin really is The Second Shittiest Human on the planet.
• Las Vegas and the simulacrum of desire.
• Marshall McLuhan's centennial was this past Thursday. Fabio played some McLuhan tapes. It's a shame the first thing I think about when hearing the name Marshall McLuhan is that dumbass Woody Allen movie. 
• Yes, I do know I'm unworthy, thanks!
• In through the back door.
• Come here.
• Name everything.
• A slight return home.

THE FIRST MARRIAGE

Peter Meinke

imagine the very first marriage a girl
and boy trembling with some inchoate
need for ceremony a desire for witness:
inventing formality like a wheel or a hoe

in a lost language in a clearing too far from here
a prophet or a prophetess intoned to the lovers
who knelt with their hearts cresting
like the unnamed ocean thinking This is true

thinking they will never be alone again
though planets slip their tracks and fish
desert the sea repeating those magic sounds
meaning I do on this stone below
this tree before these friends yes in body
and word my darkdream my sunsong yes I do I do

Thus, Our Bawdiness, Unpurged by Epitaph, Indulged at Last, Is Equally Converted into Palms, Squiggling Like Saxophones

No Thursday Night Pints. Two are out of town and the heat index was 117, and fuck that. All day yesterday I felt like I'd STOOD! outside in hundred plus heat index two-and-a-half hours the night before. It's stupid hot. So stupid hot I might not STAND! for a fucking exhibition game v Liverpool Juniors Saturday night. If it was a league game or Cup game or, HEY! remember when United suffered from motherfucking clusterfuckage and played in major international club tournaments? I'd have been required to STAND! in 117 heat index for one of those games if Kasper Payne hadn't fixed that problem. ripday, I'll email you still Saturday morning, but it might end up another night.

Like I do everyday I wrote yesterday about my latent bigotries and how they salve my complicity. I've seven or eight tablet false starts at following up - I need a new way to paraphrase it, don't you know - so until then I commend to you comments from Frances and KFO for sharp insights into the problem.

HEY! Know what's worse than a heat index of 117?

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay.

 -  Gaddis, The Recognitions

• Beyond parody.
• The rich are the welfare state.
• Shifting costs.
• Did Wall Street kill rock and roll?
• Gang of pain.
• Is there something worse than despicable?
• Obamadick.
• Verily, fuck the Democrats. 
• UPDATE! Bleggalgazing.
• Elizabeth Drew is as honest a reporter a Villager can be.
• Understanding the debt crisis.
• What happens August 3? 
• Because ideas are bulletproof.
• Ruling Britannia. 
• Frothy mix of fecal matter and lube markets frothy mix of fecal matter and lube!

• Olde Towne!
• Beallsville!
• My future hell.
• My future hell.
• Clarksburg!
• Look what I found in one of my stacks:

• Jeebus, when was the last time you thought about Wayne Booth?
• Steven's poem: the reality show.
• Haiku the economy! 

• Yours welcome in comments. 
• RIP Lucian Freud.
• Some lit-links.
• Potentially horrifying news. Jesus, what a shitty band.
• UPDATE! I get the Jane, you ignorant slut treatment!
• Other than P.J. Harvey, who gets love love love at this shitty blog, on the Mercury Prize list I've heard Elbow (and not enthusiastically) and none of the other acts.

THE HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMEN


Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

The Governor Will Give Homeless People Sleeping Bags, Let Them Stay the Night on Windswept Porticos Outside His Buildings Instead of Your Doorstep

I stopped at a bar in Beltsville before last night's game to have a beer and work on the above. The bar was almost empty, I found a quiet corner, but ten minutes later four electrical contractors from somewhere other than here came in and took up chairs near me at the bar. What you, a scientist or something, one asked, looking at my pens, my writing. Just doodling, I said. They watched for another minute or two then lost interest.

Obama's a socialist, don't you know. Goddamn Democrats are socialists, don't you know. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and nine-tenths of the Republicans are traitors and pussies, don't you know. Country's going to hell, don't you know. This isn't to slam them - their mythology is no more or less stupid than mine. Why the fuck isn't the draft beer cold, one asked. Good question.

Species of motherfucking red ants - it's only our survival instinct that keeps us from killing each other. Here's the root of my rube: what if society is, at any given moment, as good, by whatever definition of good you choose, as this species is capable? We've been indoctrinated to consider that question taboo.

• Bankster puppet. 
• Banksters.
• Determined to disembowel.
• Wall Street's euthanasia of industry.
• Murdoch and the destruction of the Left.
• No.
• American tool insufficiently pro-American.
• Standard Warren disclaimer aside, Obamadick's a motherfucker.
• Propaganda.
• On the above.
• Serendipitously, found this the day after posting the original.
• The five-albums test.
• Black Country.
• Hey Moon.

PROCLAMATION

Stuart Dischell

The governor will give
Homeless people sleeping bags,
Let them stay the night

On windswept porticos
Outside his buildings
Instead of your doorstep.

I am talking to myself
With empty rooms
I cannot bear to live in.