Honor a Going Thing, Goldfinch, Corporation, Tree, Morality

Internet Addiction Test. Not in real life, not in blog life, almost certainly in wage life I'll soon need twitter, venders I monitor now updating status via. I promise not to tweet in real life or blog life. I've still not bought a iPad or tablet or smart phone. I briefly thought about it last week when Planet and I went to a Verizon store to swap out her phone; we were hard-shopped the latest iPhone, and when Planet said can I have one and I said yes (while thinking, Would I like an iPhone?) the salesperson said no, not now, you can reserve one for a week from Saturday, so while fuck that, I got out without one but get only half-credit for willpower.

• The pink arrow painted on the curb in front of my house months ago was to mark where a new tree was to be planted, yesterday, three years after MOCO took down the maple. I know nothing about trees: you plant trees two days before December?
• Cultural materialism and identity politics.
• The resurgence of the civic.
• Public opinion is irrelevant.
• Occupy's enthusiasm and contempt for democracy.
• Occupy's anarchist roots.
• Mobs through the looking glass.
• Fuckers.
• British strike. As Yves comments, funny how little play it's getting is US.
• The unreasonable Left.
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Dr Goebbels, pick up the white courtesy phone.
• Also, motherfucking christers.
• Brownback cockroach.
• I was going to mock Ruth Marcus, but here's Greenwald.
• Things you might have missed.

• Quaranta - gone. My lasting memory - stopping at one of the two Houses on 95 north of Baltimore on way home from 2010 game in Philadelphia with Landru and Ilse, ten at night, Quaranta walks by, sees us in United garb, says hi.
• Barklage, Burch, Cronin, McTavish, Morsink, Ngwenya, Simms, Zayner.
• Robbie Russell.
• First home game March 10.
• Fire Dale Hunter!
• A.R. Ammons interview. I love Ammons.
• Fucked Up.
• Thanks to Hamster for sending me deathbed compositions, which reminded me of the Berg Violin Concerto.

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. 

Planet Called Re: George

Planet called from Bamgier asking why I hadn't blogged today's tenth anniversary of George's passing. Noted. I expect the fuck me and my calendar comment toot sweet even if I needed reminding by my daughter. As for George, I need a bigger desert island or a less stupid game. Death to the either/or.





UPDATE! A loved one emails to say play this. Yes.

Evidence Suggests Eight Complexly Folded Scuttling Works of Armament

Sam Brownback apologized (of a sorts) after his asshole staff hammered an eighteen-year-old smart-ass tweeter, and ask yourself, in Kansas (or your state) politics, what is more dangerous to Brownback's permanent Senate seat than cyber-dissent by high school seniors?

UPDATE! He's governor of Kansas now? Last time I thought of him he was a senator and 2008 Republican primary's Santorum.

Blogbud Duncan wrote about the incident, and here I plagiarize the email I sent him in response to the post, his email to me, my email to him:

Me: Re: tweet - when I stop to think of the ways I voluntarily - thoughtlessly - like this email, for instance - enter evidence into panopticon's data base, that's when I recognize with a thump how complicit I am. They know I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday, or, rather, not know, have stored the data I bought tofu at Safeway yesterday in case they ever want to know. We buy products that help us be tracked, easier and easier with every upgrade, 4D today, 5D tomorrow.

Duncan: Y'know, though, "voluntarily" and "thoughtlessly" mean two different things.  Most people aren't aware that everything they do that involves a computer is trackable, and many wouldn't be happy if they realized it.  I'm reading a good book on ethics right now that mentioned something that's bothered me before, the tendency to assume that if I voluntarily do something now, I somehow accept its most distant consequences.  This is invoked very selectively, of course: if a woman has unprotected sex, she's supposedly 'choosing' to get pregnant; if she goes for a walk alone, she's supposedly 'choosing' to be raped.  But it's not applied to other people: if a bank CEO decides to deal in risky derivatives and causes lots of people to lose their homes, he's not said to have 'chosen' to be strung up from a lamppost by an angry mob; if a very high government official chooses to have captives waterboarded, he's not 'choosing' to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell in the Hague.  But even distinguished professional philosophers have made that false connection.

Me: Yes, you're right, re: voluntarily v thoughtlessly - I thought about this when we were in the UK (London especially) when everyone everywhere is under constant surveillance when on the streets, the tube, everywhere; it's not precisely voluntary (one has to go out) and thoughtlessly is both a strategy and an avoidance.

Adding: as for tweetguilt, blogguilt, emailguilt, cellguilt, I burst to fill Our Overlord's Dossier Against Me, so far they don't (and rightfully) give a flying fuck though I flatter myself they're listening. Hey! Bankers suck! Up against the wall, motherfuckers!

• Dare I say, E.J. Dionne's revolutionary manifesto. It will convince Joe Lieberman to stop being a self-serving dick.
• Here's the sublede of a Pastor Sanctimonious column up on the front webpage at YFWP as I type this at 830 PM EST 11/28/11: Romney’s new ad is misleading, but Obama can’t complain about distortions. That may or not be gone by the time you read this sentence. What won't be gone is this final sentence in Pastor Sanctimonious' sermon on good and evil, typed without a hint of irony or self-awareness: In political advertising, it is not impurity that rankles most. It is the pretense of purity. He's a B-List asshole by YFWP's exceptionally awful standards of assholosity, but he's a sanctimonious asshole Pastor Sanctimonious is.
• Occupy London at crossroads.
• Post-democracy.
• I'm convinced Corporate wants Obama to win.
• As nature allows.
• You are what you buy.
• Narrative is distorting. 
• Someone else's children.
• Blogbud JV emailed, recommends this and this for your consideration.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Hey, someone else thinks the new kits are lame.
• Hey, don't take tylenol.
• MOCO and big boxes. Hey, why are there no Sheetzs or WaWas in MOCO? I'm asking.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• Elkin.
• Musashi plain moon.
• Yes, I did do some tweeking of the blog. The WFMU widget crashed so it's been removed, I've moved Me and Mine higher on the left, and I've expanded Because Left to twenty-five showing at once instead of ten. 
• There are some new occupants in Because Left and Because Right. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, let me know.

A GREEN CRAB'S SHELL

Mark Doty

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Pressed, Printed, Stomped, Tripped; Trapped, Tricked, Packaged, Shipped...

Jeebusfuck, those are United's new clown suits kits for 2012. What the fuck are those red things on the arms of the home blacks, red collars and armpits on the white road shirt, I mean, fuck adidas, and remember, just because there's not a stupidass third red kit shown doesn't mean there won't be a stupidass third red kit next year.

Gah, I'll save you! save me! have another GbV song:

I Am This Dream's Dog

King Shit & The Golden Boys. I surrender, I don't know why it took till now, but Guided by Voices (all Pollard projects) is now officially the third permanent member of my Sillyass Desert Island Five, leaving only two rotating spots. Be in your head:

• Cheyenne.
• Unreasonable Liberals.
• Things I will keep.
• Kleptocracy and you.
• This shitty blog's Theme Song 3.
• The coming age of Neocla.
• My kind of soldier.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf, redux.....
• Echos Myron.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• I am an scientist.
• Misanthropy's holiday.
• I am a tree.
• Banana Republic.
• Bright paper werewolves.
• Rhetorical question.
• Dodging invisible rays.
• Miller time.
• How's my drinking?
• The attempt to write.
• Big school.
• Silliman's always astonishingly generous lit-links.
• Hey Aardvark.
• Under the influence of ideals.
• Closer you are.
• On classic rock.

DREAM IN WHICH I MEET MYSELF

Lynn Emanuel

Even the butter's a block of sleazy light. I see that first,
as though I am a dreary guest come to a dreary supper.
On her table, its scrubbed deal trim and lonely as a cot,
is food for one, and everything we've ever hated: a plate of pallid
grays and whites is succotash and chops are those dark shapes glaring up at us.
Are you going to eat this? I want to ask; she's at the stove dishing up,
wearing that apron black and stiff as burned bacon, reserved for maids and waitresses.
The dream tells us: She is still a servant. Even here.
So she has to clean our plate. It's horrible to watch.
She pokes the bits of stuff into her mouth. The roll's glued shut like a little box
with all that sticky butter. Is this all living gets you? The room, a gun stuck in your back?
Don't move, It says. She's at the bureau lining up bobby pins.
Worried and fed up I wander to the window
with its strict bang of blind. My eyes fidget and scratch.
And then I see myself: I am this dream's dog. I want out.

Complete, in Ignorance, New Combinations

End of the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania in a dying Blegsylvania, end of Planet's visit, she's back in Bamgier, end of Earthgirl's show, end of Earthgirl's paintings here*, end of Occupy - all Corporate had to do was wait for motherfucking Giftmas, let the motherfucking peasants pepper-spray each other over motherfucking game-boys, though punching fucking hippies was too much fun to resist. Meme the Davis cop onto motherfucking Rembrandt, peasants, see if Corporate cares, Black Friday sales up 7% over last year in a worse economy, revolution, you motherfucking indoctrinated motherfuckers, by which I mean me, out $175 on a pair of Vasque hiking boots with goretex against Ohio snow as an early Giftmas present for Planet.

• No, I don't think Occupy's dead, but I've been reminded of the improbability if not impossibility of its success however you wish to define it. Running some coats down this afternoon. Thanks! Neil and Tracy.
• Democracy v Plutocracy: The Chart.
• Rhetorical question.
• Canada too, and soon.
• Contra-Naomi Wolf.
• *UPDATE! Not never, just this show. You read monologues out loud, no? 
• Capitalism's side-effects.
• Like this will stop the U.S.
• They hate us for our freedoms and wholesome goodness.
• The good news at the end of the slowest week of the year in a dying Blegsylvania is not only did I not full bleggalgaze, I never came close to full bleggalgazing, nor wrote about what my not coming close to full bleggalgazing signifies, not even in tablet.
• General strike in England.
• A Daniel come to judgment.
• One of many problems with Ron Paul. 
• Also, is it my imagination or are all google products, blooger to gmail, clusterfucked recently re: loading? 
• Ten years ago I would have felt morally obligated to read new DeLillo.
• American Incognito.

THE ANNIHILATION OF NOTHING

Thom Gunn

Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name

That nightly I rehearsed till led away

To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,

More space than space, over the cloud and slime,

Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,

Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,

And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire

Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,

Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided

Ultimate in its abstract devastations,

Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.

Only an infinite finitude I see

In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be

Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark

Of dread.

               Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

There's Just No Accounting for Happiness or the Way It Turns Up Like a Prodigal

I admit I've enjoyed not enjoying shit like this shit the past few days:

Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

That's David Frum's latest greatest anti-cracker apostasy, and here's what occurs to me beyond post-duh yawn on Frum's assclownery: assorted angles on bleggalgazing and my complicity via shorthanded code I assume you know ending in self-recrimination that's serious enough for self-mockery but not serious enough to make me materially change the life I'm vested in. I'll embed this block between photos of Earthgirl's latest paintings, her recent burst of creativity, width, depth, breadth, space and time, I don't feel a need to say more I assume you know what I mean, adding, save the landscapes and use as desktop backgrounds for full effect.

Also, too:

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors. When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement… well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

I admit I've enjoyed not enjoying shit like that duh the past few days.

• Next: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave a lengthy tribute to Occupy LA protesters on Friday before telling them they must leave their encampment on the lawn of City Hall by 12:01 a.m. Monday, citing public health and safety concerns. Villaraigosa, who has expressed sympathy for the protest’s aims from its beginning seven weeks ago, announced the ouster at an afternoon news conference with police Chief Charlie Beck. He said the movement that has spread in two months from New York to numerous other U.S. cities has “awakened the country’s conscience” — but also trampled grass at City Hall that must be restored.
• Occupy the Action Committee.
• As I type, this piece of shit is the banner story at YFWP, displayed as a news story, not a self-serving op-ed by motherfucking John Kyl.
• YFWP embraces new Fox talking point on Occupy.
• This is true. Bloomberg also thinks you want Bloombergocracy.
• Tool and die.
• Fruits of liberation.
• Para-professional librarianism!
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Also, motherfucking crackers.
• Police shoot man threatening suicide.
• More lists.
• Beckett, for those of you who do and will.
• Fugazi!

HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
       It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

New Fall

New The Fall. h/t and Mark E Smith Interview. And bookmark Quietus.





The Fall is in the short list for one of the three rotating spots in my Sillyass Desert Island Five Game. You are playing these LOUD! yes?

UPDATE! Also, this.

Yes. So We Must Reconnect Ideas of God, and the Definitions of “Liberty,” and the Psychology of Our Earliest Models of Governance, with Oyster Peeces in Barley Beer & Wheet, Chopt Cod & Venyson Seethed in a Blood Broth, Hominy Pottage, also Squirell

• Hey! New Paul Weller. Beats bleggalgazing. There was some, but you are spared. For Thanksgiving, be Kind, or not.
• UPDATE! Reminder! This shitty bleg's Bleggalgazing Anthem.
• My Thanksgiving gift to you.
• Corporate.
• The job-creators strike out.
• Look at Krugman. Boom soon?
• Rhetorical question.
• For whatever I didn't register until last night the Fallon-Bachmann controversy, and read Silber.
• On the above.
• Find the name of the song in this cowardly NYT piece.
• The atomization of the image.
• Elements of style.
• Experience.
• Gingrich 2012.
• Ron Paul and 9/11.
• Paul Weller isn't in the rotation of my sillyass desert island game, which doesn't mean I don't like his music.

• It's Style Council that keeps him off the island, though his later solo stuff I like I wouldn't have liked unless Style Council.
• No United player was drafted, meaning Montreal's front office is smarter than United's.
• The Diver's future, plus why isn't Omar Gonzalex getting USMNT call-ups? 
• Why he can never hate the Susquehanna.
• Allegorical codes.
• By the Waters of Babylon.
• Liszt.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• The Jam, however...

STOMACKES

Albert Goldbarth

We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals.
—James Deetz

1

Yes. So we must reconnect   

ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,”   

and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with   

oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet,

chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth,   

hominy pottage, also squirell.   

Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven   

and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash   

of white meat [cheese] and a motley collation

of eel leavings, a fine samp, and a roast Fowl.   

Worshipp first, then after—butter Biskuits!

David Ignatow:   

“seeking transcendence   

but loving bread”   

2

And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction,   

as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states   

are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics”   

and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean   

we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated   

“reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes   

simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail   

into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs   

the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack   

with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one   

can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope.   

In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread   

that resurrect the goddess and allow her   

to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell.   

We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing.   

“A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake:   

An Analysis”   

... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot,   

in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud   

of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering   

the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out   

its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often   

the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620,   

a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore   

on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad   

and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air   

so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped   

their spirits that night, from three fat Geese

and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes.

3

And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink,   

untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force   

suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,”   

reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information,   

not the paper”... everything e-storaged now.   

A thousand years of pages, pffft: dismissiveness   

as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes,   

easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge,   

occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation   

of native archeological remains,” and we mean   

human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear   

and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but   

what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth   

was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin.

I died. And I was stolen

into a land of strangers—of not-the-People.   

I floated all day, many days. And here

the ribs of my cage were empty: always

I was hungry, for the things that People need.   

But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil,

of the People; and I was restless, I had no one

for between my legs, and no drum in my chest.

There was much war from this: the People

desired me back, they said “this one

is part of many-ones,” and after words and words,   

their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes

and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last

that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered.   

4

“When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa.   

There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that   

high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names   

of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific   

labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper.   

Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter.   

Cheerfull Winter.   

Oceanus Hopkins.   

Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich.   

Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field.   

Pandora Sparrow.   

Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule?   

And who could wish to let go of this life   

when faced by Countenance Bountie?

I Wish What I Wished You Before, But Harder

Please be warned and forgive me, I'm in a good mood, had a wonderful dinner last night with Landru and Ilse and my daughter





in which history was made!

One of BFF's favorite stories to tell on me is that, years ago--Planet remembers it as being at a Maryland-Duke womens' basketball game, which puts her at about age 12 or 13--I was so deeply disturbed by Planet's stability, equanimity, poise, grace, and general goody-twoshoesedness that I offered her twenty bucks if she'd say "fuck," just once. She's faithfully refused ever since. Until tonight. A mere three months in the bower of liberal academia has changed our darling Planet profoundly. It'd make your head spin, how fast the little pottymouth said, "Baby needs a new pair of fuckin' shoes."

Mind, what happened was she had been talking about assholes running around drunk in the dorm at three in the morning at college, and I said, she's cursing now, I'm so proud, and Landru then took out the $20 bill. The conversation had turned to a need for winter shoes. She didn't remember the dare at first, so as Landru sat there tapping the $20 bill, behind his back I made eye-contact with Planet, glanced at the tapping hand on the bill, mouthed "fucking shoes," and - BANGO! - she connected, didn't hesitate saying the word or taking the money. Love. All around.

Mind, my favorite story to tell on Landru is that he was the first human not a doctor, not a nurse, not Earthgirl or me, to hold Planet. So, sorry, good mood, there's aargh in the links, but it's not heartfelt aargh, my apologies.

• Earthgirl couldn't join us as she prepares for her show. See above.
• Also, it's the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania.
• More of this, please. A bud tells me somethings astir for Dec 2, not Franklin probably (he doesn't know specifics yet, says still in planning), but something.
• Why are you murdering yourselves?
• Body politics.
• Follow the argument.
• Our Occupiers.
• What now?
• You will be in danger the rest of our lives.
• Awesome motherfuckery (Young, not Fish). 
• Ritual.
• Things you might have missed.
• Keys' signage. 
• First Thanksgiving.
• Home After Three Months Away.
• And that's pretty much it, getaway Wednesday starting Tuesday, dying Blegsylvania shutting down early the slowest week. Bleggalgazing tomorrow, the slowest day of the year in Blegsylvania, or not.
• O! woke up with this in my head. Be in yours.
• O! When I think of the below, I think of the below below.

THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

The Little Kerf the Dog Chewed in the Orange Frisbee

• Benjamin Britten was born 98 years ago today. Beyond the piano and cello music I love, his Peter Grimes is the only opera I listen to with any regularity, I've no idea why it works.
• Airborne event, 11/21/11. Mandatory, yo.
• The shamelessness of the powerful. 
• The shamelessness of the powerful.
• A culture dedicated to creating hell.
• Financialization, managerialism, abject failure.
• True sign of economic depression. 
• Occupy posters.
• First politician of the Occupy era? I post that just to again ask: there's no charismatic demagogue from the Left who sees opportunity for personal power? Not via Occupy: I've been asking this for two years.
• It's a flipped bird, it's a pain, it's....
• Busy days, just songs, links, poem today, probably tomorrow too, but here, have another Earthgirl painting:

• Hey! Did you know that Washington DC has a professional soccer team? It's true, and its run by motherfucking morons.
• Cheap laughs.
• ICC, ICC, ICC. ICC.
• Also, motherfucking Maryland cracker.
• And let the Season of Motherfucking Lists begin. I note its start; I haven't the fuck to go through the list.
• Gass for those of you who do, with good news.
• Beckett for those of you who do, who will.
• New Elliott Smith song discovered for those of you who do. I never did, but understand why some do.
• Britten, Cello Sonata 2: Declamatio. Fugo. Scherzo. Adante lento. Ciaconna.
• I asked Hamster to pick some of his favorites:
• Serenade for Tenor and Horn.
• Nocturnal after John Dowland.
• Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

SEPARATION AT BURNT ISLAND

D. Nurkse

Brothers and sisters, who live after us,   

don't be afraid of our loneliness,   

our dented wiffle ball, the little kerf   

the dog chewed in the orange Frisbee.   

Don't grieve for our kite; not the frayed string   

that clings to your ankle, not the collapsed wing.   

We lived on earth, we married, we touched each other   

with our hands, with our hair that cannot feel   

but that we felt luxuriously, and with promises.   

We made these bike tracks in the sand   

—don't follow them—and this calcined matchhead   

is the last statue of our King.   

We lived between Cygnus and Orion,   

resenting the blurriness of the Pleiades,   

in a house identical to its neighbors—   

stepwise windows, ants never to be repelled,   

TV like a window into the mind   

that can't stop talking, redwood deck   

facing the ocean.   

Everything was covered with sand; the seams   

of the white lace dress, the child's hinged cup,   

the watch (even under the crystal), the legal papers.   

We were like you, or tried to be. We divided our treasures   

(a marble with no inside, a brooch from Siena),   

signed our names with all our strength, and went home   

in two directions, while the marriage continued   

without us in the whirling voice of gulls.

The Old Wound in My Ass Has Opened Again, but I Am Past the Prodigies of Youth's Campaigns

Since when does the NYPD investigate Al-Qaeda bomb plots? When it's transparently shameless bullshit in a world run by shameless professional bullshitters:

New York officials said on Sunday police had arrested a man trying to build a pipe bomb with instructions from an al Qaeda magazine which he planned to use against U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan... The suspect - identified as Jose Pimentel, 27 - was charged with three terrorism-related counts and two other counts, court documents said... Beyond soldiers, his intended targets were allegedly police officers and post offices, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a joint news conference with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and District Attorney Cyrus Vance, the chief prosecutor for Manhattan... Pimentel had been under surveillance since May 2009 and was a "lone wolf" who got instructions on building a pipe bomb from "Inspire" magazine, published by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Kelly said.

Since 2009! Imperative he be arrested yesterday! Thank god for the NYPD for saving us massive terrorist destruction, please note that the police themselves were the target! A pint to the first of you who catches a motherfucking professional cracker-baiter tagging Pimental "The Occupy Terrorist." Fuck me Christ, here's Rose in the kitchen sink showering off the bullshit:

• What lack dooms movements?
• The ammo may be different but it's the thought that counts.
• How Wall Street views Occupy.
• Fairly standard police procedures.
• Occupy versus police repression.
• Throwing out the masters' tools.
• The occupation of Franklin. 
• Curling up into a ball is violent resistance.
• Letter.
• #OccupyAlbany continued arrests under Cuomo curfew. #OccupyBangor Why R U Here? With drummer! #OccupyBoston Interviews with Occupiers. #OccupyChicago twitter stream infested with trolls. Rahm? Dave? #OccupyDC occupies closed homeless shelter DC hopes to develop, makes Pravda. #OccupyIowa Iowa caucus wild card. #OccupyNashville mike checks Rummy at fundraiser. #OccupyNashville link to fake “Nashville Electric Service” van doing surveillance. #OccupyOakland situation fluid as of this writing. West Coast port shutdown December 12 (George Washington). #OccupyPortland: Confluence with single payer advocates. #OccupySeattle Interview with Dorey Rainey. #OccupyWallStreet: "NYPD Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries" (May S). (h/t)
  .01%.
• The smell of Corporate fear.
• Glitch in the matrix.
• Liberalism: an ideology of exclusion?
• The Annotated Ann Coulter, part one.
• Do NOT buy me this for Giftmas.
• On the above, or: go ahead, stab yourself in the eye with a pen.
• Poop. I got slapped by Father Meyer when I was twelve when I asked him the same question during a CCD class at St Martins.
• For Thine is the Corporation.
• Darkblack's (last for a while) Sunday Overnight.
• Playlist.
• Triumph of life.

FABRICATION OF ANCESTORS

Alan Dugan

The old wound in my ass

has opened up again, but I

am past the prodigies

of youth’s campaigns, and weep

where I used to laugh

in war’s red humors, half

in love with silly-assed pains

and half not feeling them.

I have to sit up with

an indoor unsittable itch

before I go down late

and weeping to the storm-

cellar on a dirty night

and go to bed with the worms.

So pull dirt up over me

and make a family joke

for Old Billy Blue Balls,

the oldest private in the world

with two ass-holes and no

place more to go to for a laugh

except the last one. Say:

The North won the Civil War

without much help from me

although I wear a proof

of the war’s obscenity.

If He Rests It’s to Wind the Metronome or Sip His Cup of Ice . . .

• Contest! Make a verb out of Katehi.
• Woman gets jail for food stamp fraud, banksters get.....
• Of course it is....
• The memo....
• PERF.
• Metaphor.
• UPDATE! Ambrose Bierce on Occupy.
• Metaphor. 
• UPDATE! (h/t)

• UPDATE! On the above.
• Metaphor. 
• Strategy.
• Does America need Wall Street?
• Also, motherfucking crackers. 
• Radio silence. Good luck, friend.
• Fear. 
• Today in futility: taking for granted the YFWP ombudsman Patrick Pexton is a motherfucking coward, is he more a motherfucking jackass than motherfucking fool or motherfucking visa versa?
  

This is the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania, I'm picking up my daughter at BWI this evening and have plans most nights this week and all day and night this coming weekend, which isn't why I'm incapable of forming a half-coherent paragraph on my thoughts regarding Occupy's meanings, re: my full support for it v my half-assed participation in it. Perhaps the slowest week of the year in Blegsylvania is the time to post inchoate thoughts, though busy weeks in Blegsylvania have never been an impediment to such practice. In any case, I've watched this dozens of times in the past week, this is now BLCKDGRD - Theme Song 4:






INTROIT AND FUGUE

D. Nurkse

After death, my father   

practices meticulously   

until the Bach is seamless,   

spun glass in a dream,   

you can no longer tell   

where the modulations are,   

or the pedal shifts

or the split fingerings . . .

if he rests

it’s to wind the metronome   

or sip his cup of ice . . .

but who is the other old man   

in the identical flannel gown,   

head cocked, listening

ever more critically,

deeper in the empty room?

Alone with Our Madness and Favorite Flower We See That There Really Is Nothing Left to Write About

I was running errands last evening, flipping stations in the car (my CD player died four days ago, I need a new car for Giftmas! yo), I landed on WAMU at 6:10, Market Place, public radio's Corporate business propaganda show, they were clowning Occupy deliberately and clowning Occupy (with varying levels of awareness) when trying not to clown on Occupy, and it occurred to me, clown the fuck away, Occupy the brand gets love-mocked or hate-mocked on NPR, on South Park, remember Corporate's Rules of Branding, all publicity is good publicity, even the nasty things, so please, clown away.

Oh! my watch isn't broke. I got duped by a fraud watch-repairman at Rodman's in Friendship Heights who sold me a bad battery, so I was told by the sales clerk at some jewelry store at L and Connecticut where I dropped it off to have it fixed before having lunch with a digital friend who's now an analog friend. Please note the newest addition to Me and Mine. This opportunity can be yours too! One major advantage is that while Me and Mine does update when one last posts it is organized alphabetically rather than by most recent post so your blog doesn't sink like an anchor of shame to the bottom of the blogroll when you don't post.

I've never had a digital wristwatch, I've always done circle 1-12. It'd been five, six days without that watch on my wrist after forever years with a watch on my wrist and, holyfuck, I put it on yesterday afternoon as soon as I had it back but didn't look at it until 9:30 last night and for the first time since I learned how to tell time, for a fraction of a fraction of a second I couldn't tell time, the oddest sensation I've had since the last until the next. Fine metaphors abound.

• Have another Earthgirl painting. 
• After the eviction.
• Occupy turns a corner.
• Occupy Congress? Fake.
• We are all occupiers. 
• Have another police beating.
• The nerdiest way to think about Occupy is the best way.
• The coming slime campaign.
• Infra violence.
• Harvey's Urban Roots of Financial Crisis, part two.
• More Harvey.
• Today's bleggal-viral image:

• Fuck, She Is as Shitty as the World's Shittiest Human (FSISWSH!) accuses Obama of not honoring his oath to uphold the Israeli constitution.
• Busy.
• Threat #1.
• Copyleft.
• We're all postmodern these days. 
• The Parable of the Green Mug.
• Heh. Ashbery hate. I do understand.
• Zombies.
• Grapes of Roth.
• Handke for those of you who do. (h/t)
• Literary Hipsters Handbook.
• Dimensions of time and space. 
• Thanks to R for sending me the Aphex Twin/Penderecki below!

LATE ECHO

John Ashbery

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.