No, I mean I don't have a plan how I'm to integrate reading The Recognitions into the daily tongue-diving with kayfabe that is this shitty blog, but:
Three years later, that partisan Deity whose most recent attention to the family had been Aunt May's rescue from mortality, acted in Wyatt's direction (though as the boy and his father independently suspected, perhaps it was a different God altogether). Wyatt was taken with a fever which burned him down to seventy-nine pounds. In this refined state he was exhibited to medical students in the amphitheater of a highly endowed hospital. They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Physicians, technicians, and interns X-rayed the boy from every possible angle, injected his arms with a new disease they believed they could cure, took blood by the bottleful from one arm to investigate, and poured the blood of six other people into the other. They collected about his bed and pounded him, tapped his chest, thrust with furious hands for his liver, pumped his stomach with a lead-weighted tube, kneaded his groin, palped his spleen, and recorded the defiant beats of his heart with electronic machinery.
Please read that out loud for full effect, to feel your mouth move.
I don't have a plan for The Recognitions beyond reading it (out loud when possible) and posting snippets that make me giggle and/or gasp here. No reading group is suggested nor will be housed here. Go find a copy yourself if you're curious, but POW! a novel about the nature of kayfabe in an era when the elite are breaking kayfabe? When nothing is more fun to consider than kayfabe? In July, during the Blog Days of Summer, in dying Stringtown Blegsylvania, the summer before a presidential election Blog Days of Summer year?
- There is no progressive case for deficit cutting.
- Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
- Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
- Left Neo-Liberalism versus Grassroots Liberalism.
- Liberal politics.
- Why Liberals are lame.
- Krugman is increasingly radical? Maybe, but not enough.
- Saying no to compromise.
- Alice in Billlionaireland.
- France next.
- Unmediated.
- The former.
- Cultural illogic.
- Today is SeatSix's and Elric's (who is still too pissed off about something to contribute here in comments any more) father's 79th birthday.
- I am shocked to learn Vincent Gray is a corrupt asshole.
- Purple Line.
- Being a midget on PCP is no excuse.
- Herman Melville's lifetime literary earnings.
- Silliman's always awesomely generous lit links.
- They found it a very interesting case, and said so. In fact they said very little else. Think about those two sentences, square in the middle of the paragraph, physically and contextually.
- What you can buy me for my birthday. (h/t)
- Geek the girl.
MOTTLED TUESDAY
John Ashbery
Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.
Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.
