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.