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.
