It's time for a friendly reminder: Fleabus is the greatest cat of all time and all her photographs are by my daughter Planet (unless otherwise noted).
And a Clops update: I haven't heard from the guy currently fostering Clops - he was supposed to call Friday to tell me about Clops' Thursday visit to the vet. I'd told him Monday that they should keep Clops if they want Clops - that I would relinquish any claim to Clops if the guy and his wife fell in love with Clops, and I think he thanked me - in any case he sounded relieved - though promised to keep me informed. I don't think Clops will come live with us - which is cool, the world is full of cats that need homes, we'll get one before the end of the summer - but just to taunt fate, if Clops does come to live with us we're now going to call him Aargh.
Meanwhile, I need to badger Planet to get me new Fleabus photos before Planet takes herself and her camera off to Ohio in ONE MONTH. Holyshit.
- UPDATE! Obvious things.
- Yes, you don't need to tell me that Elizabeth Warren was never the progressive dreamboat Liberals painted her; in one sense that makes Obama more of a pussy.
- Is Eric Cantor "dumb as a bag of rocks?" I bet a pint I could win a round of Jeopardy against Eric Cantor if the categories were Postmodern American Fiction, Postmodern American Poetry, Pere Ubu, My Complicity, Bleggalgazing, and Kasper Payne's Calamitous Latin American Signings. I bet he could kick my ass at Corporate Calvinball.
- The new Let Them Eat Cake.
- Robert Reich is profoundly stupid.
- On the above.
- Haven't forgot about Iran.
- This week's top muckreads.
- Stenographers.
- How to do a coup.
- Robber barons.
- It's been twenty-five years at least, but I've walked this stretch of track literally thousands of times.
- Little Danny Snyder.
- English is a shameless whore.
- The art of cruelty.
- HOLYFUCK! Somebody, please video and post to youtube!
- This.
MECHANISM
A.R. Ammons
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
morality: any working order,
animate or inanimate: it
has managed directed balance,
the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
some energy left to the mechanism,
some ash, enough energy held
to maintain the order in repair,
assure further consumption of entropy,
expending energy to strengthen order:
honor the persisting reactor,
the container of change, the moderator: the yellow
bird flashes black wing-bars
in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
startles the hawk with beauty,
flitting to a branch where
flash vanishes into stillness,
hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
of control,
the gastric transformations, seed
dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
unique genes,
molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
some cells set aside for the special work, mind
or perception rising into orders of courtship,
territorial rights, mind rising
from the physical chemistries
to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
racial satisfaction:
heat kept by a feathered skin:
the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
burner under the flask)
so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame
staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the
goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.
