Fifty-Two Today

It Hurts, This Wanting to Give a Dimension to Life When Life Is Precisely That Dimension

This is to assure you that with the nine cats comes garden statuary. Everything's an art project. So far I've been banned buying a reflecting ball, a big cobalt blue one to sit next to the crepe myrtle, but Planet and I are determined. Yes, I posted the Ashbery poem below this past July and titled this post the same as that post.

• Unsatisfied.
• 2011: Thoughts.
• Answering machine.
• 2012: Already over.
• Nowhere is home.
• Work v kayfabe?
• Time is killing us.
• Typology of scholars: the scientist.
• Little mascara.
• Popularity of socialism!
• Here comes a regular.
• American robots.
• Achin to be.
• Panopticon.
• I will dare.
• ICC! 
• Seen your video.
• PSG unveil Carlo Ancelotti's eyebrow.
• Beer for breakfast.
• Year's reading list.
• We're coming out.
• Pore.
• If only you were lonely.
• On Kate Bush.
• Differences.
• Why am I playing Replacements' songs today? Look later.

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.

Sixty-Five Today

I was sixteen when I first heard Horses. We were at a party.* Towards midnight, after the requisite playing of Dark Side of the Moon and Morrison Hotel and Sgt Pepper and Zeppelin and Zeppelin and more motherfucking Zeppelin, this girl who had transferred to my high school took my turn at selecting the next album (it was our first date) and put on the album she'd brought with her. That I no longer listen to Patti Smith unless I hear her on the radio nor communicate with the girl who brought the album doesn't alter my self-hagiography that something changed that night.





*His ear lobe fell in the derp.

And While Certainly They Are Laughing at Me, and All Around Me Is Racket of These Cats Not Making It, I Make It in My Wicker Basket

Sorry, forgot to put up a header photo last night. Out to dinner last night with Planet and he who it occurs to me I haven't written about much less considered a nom-de-blog but nonetheless seems to be a good guy who makes my daughter happy and Earthgirl and Ilse and Landru, came home stuffed, played with Stanley, read 1Q84 (holyfuck), didn't even log in and check my statcount, what the fuck's up with that, I'm a fucking attention slut, I'm always checking my statcounter just like you do. I'll try to remember to post a header tonight.

Still, it reminds me that for all I gently badger Planet for new Fleabus photos, they aren't forthcoming. That phase is over. Up above is Napoleon, the domesticated feral, shot taken by me. Consider this the year end bleggalgaze: unless otherwise noted, any and all pheline photos displayed hence (which will include Fleabus, but also Nap and Stanley and Rose and Sara and Frankie and Mom Cat and Gray Cat and probably never Jess), including this one below, a recent night header and popular among two of you, are taken by me, with the commensurate dip in quality.

• Year end bleggalgazing: Catch It!
• Itinerant punk.
• O, while I always try to employ the wtf here - I'm still too cautious of it's potential alienating effects, though I hope to wtf the wtf - over at the other place, still in indecipherable calligraghy....
• Towards a typology of scholars.
• Hope in a cold season. (h/t)
• Working arrangement.
• Marginalizing Ron Paul.
• Down with all reactionaries.
• Crucifying Ron Paul. 
• Excommunicating Ron Paul.
• I'm not supporting Ron Paul, I won't vote for Ron Paul, it's grimly entertaining watching Corporate go after Ron Paul.
• I'd also point out that many of the Leftbots Snoopy-dancing the crucifying and excommunicating of Ron Paul by Rightbots would happily crucify and excommunicate a Left Ron Paul.
• Annals of nincompoopery.
• The miracle of solvency.
• Capitalism.
• The year in review.
• To be honest, I'd forgot about Sarah Hall. Time to remedy.
• Books read and not read in 2011. Look, someone else read The Recognitions in 2011, and Elkin. And I never got Auster - I assume that's on me.
• I feel obliged to post at least one link to Dove v Vendler.
• Apex 2011.
• Classical music's ethically challenged funders.
• Wanna hear a new song by Karin Andersson?
• 70 minutes of the New York Dolls.
• The Mekons interviewed.
• Asparagus Song live! You only think I play a lot of Yo La Tengo here. Wait till next year.

WICKER BASKET

Robert Creeley

Comes the time when it's later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter--

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor's,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes--

So that's you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know--

Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz--

And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we're gone.
She turns me on--

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands
   me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it--

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

Born Eighty-Nine Years Ago Today

Day did not dawn. The night withdrew to expose it evenly pallid from one end to the other as a treated corpse, where the hair, grown on unaware of the futility of its adornment, the moment of the brown spot past, is shaved away like those early hours stubbed into being and were gone, and the day laid out, shreds of its first reluctance to appear still blown across its face where dark was no longer privation of light but the other way round as good, exposed passive and foolish at the lifting of chaos, is the absence of evil. The day existed sunless, its light without apparent source, its passage without continuity, not following as life does but co-existent with itself, and getting through it was to blunder upon its familiar features, its ribs and hollows, impotent parts and still extensions, with neither surprise, nor hope, like the blind man identifying with a memory-sensitized hand the body of a familiar in what they had both called life.

 - William Gaddis, The Recogntions

New rules! Or not. Will or won't, depending. Click, yo. Or not.

Or Until They Swerved in a Swift, Circular Line to the Left Because of the Firecat

This story about Pentagon cuts of generals and majors could have gone to press two weeks ago, two weeks from now, what is the Post's interest in releasing it yesterday, the Wednesday between Giftmas and New Year, the Wednesday before the first Republican primary Tuesday? Speculate.

How's that for mailing it in? The XTC song in one of my fifty most air-guitared songs ever and reliable bit here with the right topical. Also, I'm not mailing it in: Vagabound Scholar has continued the tradition of the great Jon Swift's annual bloggal roundup. Jon/Al did me a major Kind five or six times; he would badger me to send in my favorite BDR post of the year to blogwhore at his roundup. Looking at some of the bloggers on Vagabound's list and on his blegroll, many of you who read me now must have found me through Al, a good and Kind guy.

• American war crimes.
• Arms trade infographic.
• Why America can't afford its military.
• Eskimos and sasquatch to invade Iraq.
• Obama's skill at -.06%ism.
• Robert Reich predicts what I've been predicting for three years.
• Hobsbawn says party like it's 1848.
• Surging Santorum.
• You're libertarian ideas are intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your racist newsletter.
• I never got Julian Barnes. I assume that's on me.
• Ezra Pound's mugshot. I never got Pound. I assume that's on me.
• The fart and wheeze of Gardenella Dingledart.
• Elliott Carter's music of time. I must confess, listening to Carter on his recent birthday, it sounded like a museum of the never-was world too. 
• Looking for the XTC I found this, one of my twenty most air-guitared songs ever:

EARTHY ANECDOTE

Wallace Stevens

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

Born Sixty-One Years Ago Today

More Alex Chilton songs below fold:
















And this, easily one of the five most air-guitared songs of my life:

New tablet, a size I've never had before, what to do with the rules I enforce to encourage the fake breaking of rules will be documented here, or not.

Make a Kind of Story of Kinked Plot

You like the iPad? L asked at a Tuesday edition of Thursday Night Pints. Yeah, I said, I like it a lot, though this morning I bought two new Moleskines, including an excellent giant hardback quadrille I'd never seen before. Good, said D, does this mean you're tired of blogging, you're gonna start writing again? Tired of blogging? asked K. What does that have to do with buying new tablets? When he's tired of blogging he buys new tablets even if he doesn't need them, said L,  - pen's too, D said - and writes in them more than usual. Yes, true, I said, but I really did need new tablets, I said, I can go to the car and show you the two full ones. Something pissed him off, said D, over in blogworld or whatever he calls it. L said, someone must have ignored or disrespected him. D said, yeah, or someone turned asshole and wrecked the club's tree fort in a hissy fit, he hates that too. I'm sitting right here, I said. What happened that pissed you off, asked K. Nothing, I said, I'm not pissed off. I bet, said L, you posted a link to a blog and the blogger looked to see who was sending the boinks - pings, hissed K - and he looked at your blog for a second and dismissed you as insignificant. Yes I have bitched about that before, I said, I'm still small that way, but no, that's not it, I needed new tablets. D asked, can you see yourself blogging a year from now? I can't imagine a year from now, I said, without new tablets. That's hardly worth a pint, said K, getting up to buy a round.

• Sen and the folly of austerity. 
• Obamasshole: Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals. Security goals? Political goals, asshat. And yes, I know they're the same to the fucker.
• Same article: Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss. 
• Motherfucking Democrats.
• Snapshots of Washington's essence.
• How Ron Paul with change the Republican Party. Beinart has been consistently wrong about everything, but it's still an interesting hypothetical.
• Libertarian or rapper? Take the quiz! 
• Dembot apologists.
• He's more delusional than you, pal.
• 2011's most memorable?
• For the Love of D_g.  
• Things you might have missed.
• Huh? And so, to conclude concerning the beginning of the question, there is in some sense a “return to the things themselves” because there is a return to the idea that it is really the things themselves which appear. There is this kind of idea in Logics of Worlds and this is why it is so difficult, in fact: that if the things themselves are pure multiplicities, if it is really a pure multiplicity which appears and nothing else, then it is being which appears. And so, there is not the Kantian distinction between the thing-in-itself, which we cannot know, in fact, and the organization of a thing which is a transcendental nature. In my region, the transcendental is the transcendental of the thing and we can absolutely know the thing as thing — by mathematics, precisely by the mathematics of multiplicity. But to know the thing not only as thing, a being-qua-being, but as being as appearing in the world, we can also know something of that. But we must only assume that there is something other than pure multiplicity in its mathematical composition, there is something which is like an indexation, like a mark, of the multiplicity which is the thing that the multiplicity appears to be within a determinate world. So it is almost a thing-itself but with the transformation of the notion of “thing.” That is the point. There's another club of 1% I don't qualify for.
• Worthy list. I tried Ice Trilogy four months ago and intensely disliked it after initially liking the first 2/3rds of the first, it was visceral, weirdly, never experienced anything like that reaction. I was in the reading slump, which had nothing to do with anything other than I'm going to try it again soon now that I'm out of the slump to be fair to both the book and, more selfishly, me.
• The few of you regulars who read in the wee hours of EST, do you like the headers I leave for you?
• Cristiano Ronaldo consults diving expert. 
• How ghosts affect relationships.
• Expect lots of His Name is Alive in the days to come, cause it's been a couple of years since I was listening, and holyfuck.
• Doom and Gloom from the Tomb.
• Three excellent WFMU djs 2011 lists, with sound.
• Yes, I know he was born 61 years ago today. Songs this afternoon.
• Drive By.
• Aether.
• The Royal Family.
• I learned about The Necks this past year while not listening to KEXP. Easy snark, it's still a good station, their flagship djs pissed me off and reminded me to listen to WFMU. I'm grateful. Have part one of a The Necks song, then a poem, then part two:

ROYAL

Joshua Clover

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.

They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned

                                      to call this a nature show.

Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for

     the face.

Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed

     meditation.

But the song was never familiar.

Because this was the only room this was the only room where we

     undressed—:

                                      that was the plot.

They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening

     to us.

The image burning in.

Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed

     skin.

We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous

     advances.

All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but

     not enough.

We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed

     you to the story.

This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire

                                      wrapped in ripe gray gauze—

                                      you like it.

(2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry

     speed—the Laws

                                      prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.)

They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down.

This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the

     room like sand.

Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire.

The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of

     kinked plot

                                      which can’t be straightened like a motel wire

                                      hanger looped around your wrists.

The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought—

                                      the image burning in now.

We began to understand what they were—:

                                      the Thou & the shalt & the not

Last Giftmas Bleg (If Not) Ever (At Least til Next Year)

Not my favorite Bowie song by a wide margin, but actually live, lost and now found.

There's a Jolt, Quasi-Electric, When One of Our Myths Reverts to Abstraction

• Turboparalysis.
• The American fascist sandwich.
• Population explosion.
• The big lie.
• Toward the end of plutocracy.
• Children dressed as animals dressed as children.
• Motherfucking cops.
• Santorum is surging!
• Can't be funky.

• Jim's blog's birthday.
• William Gass and the music of prose. This was actually going to be the meat of the post (and I suppose it still is even if it's not the lede): it's connected to both how I think I'm reading now (now that I'm reading again) and especially how I listen to music now. It reminded me of conversations I've had lately with Earthgirl and friends, that it's Schumann and Beethoven and even (and this shocks me) Chopin that make no sense to me at all, that sounds like inchoate noise that has no relationship to the world I live in. Then I looked down and what I'd written wasn't like what I like to write, so this paragraph instead. Also, once I finish 1Q84 (and I haven't been inhabited like this since The Lonely Ones a year or more ago), 3rd time into The Tunnel is next.
• Piano phase.
• Joseph Arthur. I missed his new album this year because I had stopped listening to KEXP - that fatuous dj introducing Arthur in the first vid is one of the two who not only wouldn't play Beefheart the day after his death but wouldn't even acknowledge my email, this after I'd given the station literally hundreds of dollar every year for a decade. Screw her, but I do like Joseph Arthur, played some here within the past month.
• Stand up and fight.

UPPER WORLD

Rae Armantrout

If sadness
is akin to patience,

                  we're back!


Pattern recognition
was our first response

to loneliness.

Here and there were like
one place.

But we need to triangulate,
find someone to show.

     *

There's a jolt, quasi-electric,
when one of our myths
reverts to abstraction.

Now we all know
every name's Eurydice, 
briefly returned
from blankness

and the way back
won't bear scrutiny.

High voices
over rapid-pulsing synthesizers
intone, "without you" --

which is soothing.

We prefer meta-significance:

the way the clouds exchange
white scraps
in glory.

No more wishes.

No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools

Nothing Is Plumb, Level, or Square

The blogroll reorg has been completed. I use the blogrolls as my bookmarking system. The primary (but not only) reason I moved from typepad fourteen months ago is I wanted the floating blogrolls Blooger provides, the self-updating function: I love it. Still, there are, for whatever reasons, blogs and sites that don't or can't feed the burners, and they sink to the bottom. Look! Over there in the left column, a new blogroll, just beneath the above photo of Fleabus, Feedless. All are worth your time.

Blegsylvania still in Giftmas slowdown, so yes, this is another mail-it-in post. As for Giftmas, I made out like a thief, especially thanks to SeatSix and Earthgirl - I now own my very first piece of Apple machinery. Tell me what apps I should download for the iPad, you fellow complicit capitalist stooges! And as much as I'd like to write about my MiL and BiL, you'll have to make do with songs, links, and poem.

• Imagine if the US media had covered Occupy like this.
• The trouble w/principles, or: how not to lose friends and alienate people while learning economics.
• Motherfucking cops.
• Law has no power.
• Occupy next year.
• The sustained crucifixion of Bradley Manning.
• E.J. Dionne is a profoundly stupid man.
• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let Newt be cracker nominee for entertainment value alone.
• PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let Newt be cracker nominee for entertainment value alone.
• Two miles from where Earthgirl grew up (and where I was last night - her assclown brother still lives there). I drive by the old geospacial map campus all the time, it's still heavily guarded though no one comes or goes.
• The Shuffle.
• Have I ever mentioned I love Pere Ubu? Did you know this isn't the first morning I woke up with Pere Ubu in my head?

LOVE SONG: I AND THOU

Alan Dugan

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

     the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

     any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

     dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

     I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

     for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

     hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

     at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

     Oh I spat rage’s nails

into the frame-up of my work:

     it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

     for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

     skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

     but I planned it. I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

     will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

     to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

     I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.

And the Deer You Rode In On

Each Morning He’d Anoint the Room’s Four Corners with an Arc of Piss, and Then — Until He Was Forcibly Halted - Beat His Forehead Open on the Eastern Wall

The guy who correctly tore me a new one over the deerhunter sent me an email saying he came back and tunes in, and sincere thanks, best Giftmas present ever since the last until the next. He remembers being angry more that I fuckyeahed the story since it was a (I think) preteen kid who found the father's body (and: Yes, Larkin) than that I fuckyeahed the death of a bambikiller who may have been hunting for his family's winter provisions. Thanks to Pushing Upwards for your email too!

Also, weird Giftmas: the people I know who usually enjoy it are sour, many I know who loathe it aren't enjoying their loathing like they like to. Strangest days of my life.

Also, links are going to be sparse. I'll post what's available, some music and poetry, but barring KABOOM! I'm mailing it in for a few slow days, one way and another.

Also, I'm now halfway through 1Q84 and holyfuck! the novel and holyfuck! I can read again! (even if I don't have the time and have old eyes when I do).

Also, I have no idea why I thought of Tiny Desk Unit, but there's a connection between the slavia I'm Knez of and Tiny Desk Unit I'd completely forgotten until I thought of Tiny Desk Unit for no reason.

Also, Planet tells me no one - none of her friends here, none of her friends at Bamgier - she has shown Kids in the Hall to gets it at all. What the fuck?






STONEHENGE

Albert Goldbarth

Each morning he’d anoint the room’s four corners

with an arc of piss, and then—until

he was forcibly halted—beat his forehead open

on the eastern wall, the “sunrise wall,”

incanting a doggerel prayer about God

the Flower, God of the Hot Plucked Heart; and

she, if loose in the halls, would join him,

squatting in the center of the room and masturbating

with a stolen bar of soap. This isn’t why

they were sent to the madhouse: this is what

they needed to do once in the madhouse: this

is the only meaningful ritual they could fashion

there, created from the few, make-do

materials available. It isn’t wondrous strange

more than the mega-boozhwah formulaic splendor

of my sister’s wedding ten, eleven years ago:

her opulent bouquet of plastic flowers

(for the wilting pour of wattage at the photo session),

nigglingly arranged to match the real bouquet

she carried down the aisle, bloom per bloom;

the five-foot Taj Mahal of sculpted pastel sherbet;

endless “Fiddler on the Roof”; I’m sorry

now I cranked my academic sneer hauteur in place

all night. I’m sorry I didn’t lose myself

like a drunken bee in a room-sized rose,

in waltzing Auntie Sally to the lush swell

of the band. We need this thing. There’s not one

mineral in Stonehenge that our blood can’t also raise.

One dusk, one vividly contusion-color

dusk, with my fists in my pockets and

a puzzle of fish-rib clouds in the sky, I

stopped at the low-level glow of a basement window

(Hot Good Noodle Shop) and furtively looked in:

a full-grown pig was splayed on the table,

stunned but fitfully twitching, it looked as if

it had grasshoppers under its skin. A man and a woman

slit that body jaw-to-ass with an ornate knife,

and then they both scooped out a tumble

of many dozens of wasps, preserved

by the oils of living pig to a beautiful black and amber

gem-like sheen. I saw it. Did I

see it? From inside this, over their wrists

in the tripes, they carefully removed

the wooden doll of a man and the wooden doll of a woman

maybe two inches tall, a tiny lacquered sun

and matching brass coin of a moon, and then

a child’s-third-grade-version of a house

made out of pallid wax: a square of walls,

a pyramid roof, and a real smoking chimney.

I Fell into the State, and I Hunched in Its Belly Till My Wet Fur Froze

I had a reader who picked me up two blog addresses ago in 2004 and read me and occasionally commented for five years until I posted a link to a story about a deer-hunter who fell from a tree-stand and died while trying to shoot a deer and I teeheed some version of YAY! I am small this way. I've always admitted I'm a bigot, long-timers here can vouch, though it occurs to me I haven't said so so explicitly in a while, so here it is: I hold negative stereotypes against American crackers and christers. In my happiness that the hunter bambied himself, my first reaction never considered that the hunter's primary goal might have been feeding his family through a harsh winter. The reader teed me up, whacked me down the fairway, then said goodbye and, unless he's moved from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has not been back.

This off yesterday's post in which I boofuckinghooed the stress of Air Force drone pilots as reported in the NYT. Friends reminded me not to attack the soldier, attack the system that deliberately creates the economic distress necessary to maintain an all volunteer military. Here's some of my email response:

The boofuckinghoo was more directed at the attempt by the Times to elicit sympathy from me for the pilots who in theory aspired to this job - presumably it's highly competitive (since there are only X-number (someone around 800 if I remember correctly off the top of my head) and prestigious and a good career path. And the story also stated that their stress is being caused by long hours, not guilty consciences.

Drones bother me inordinately and intensely on multiple and conflicting levels, including the deep level of moral cowardice involved in sitting in a room thousands of miles away and playing with deadly model airplanes. Perhaps to the bombed there's little difference between being obliterated with a drone as opposed to being firebombed by B-29s over Dresden, but there is a difference between the guy in the ball turret with flak flying at him and some drone jockey in an air conditioned room at some Air Force facility.

So yes, while I lack decent sympathy for the drone pilots, I shouldn't have been so casual vis a vis the family members their stress affects. I'll address it with an update to the post or (far more likely) next non-Giftmas in post....

and parts of another:

In my reflexive first thoughts it never occurred to me to equate these drone pilots sitting on an Air Force base safe and whole and the marine private getting shot at. My assumption is/was that the drone pilots have relatively privileged status within the military. That doesn't mean they didn't join the military for the same economic reasons that the marine private did. That's my mistake.

That's the gist of what I wanted to cop-to here, so I've spared me (and you) the eight more paragraphs I wrote in tablet reiterating the duhalectics we all recite to each other daily, though this: it occurs to me that, beyond the stereotypes I attach to people who want to be and/or are coerced into uniform, my different by degree loathing of drone pilots is animated by what I perceive to be a lack of honor in how they kill, that the murders they commit are less moral by whit of their own lack of mortal danger. That's a reaction that speaks to my induhctrination, my watching Patton and reading Catton over and over in my early teens, the still present code of military honor I once, and still must at some root level, romanticize. I'm working on it.

• Only $13.98 from Toys-R-Us.
• Stereotyping you by your favorite album of 2011. My four favorite on the list are Fucked Up, PJ Harvey, Julianna Barwick, and Kate Bush. Hilarity ensues as I agree with the judgments.
• There's no sense in being halfway radical.
• Republicans for Revolution.
• Pied Cow diplomatic vanguard.
• They get us with their words.
• A Giftmas message from America's rich.
• On the above.
• Motherfucking cops.
• The more things change...
• How Hitchens saved American wing-nuttery.
• Live near DC and want to save a dog?
• Do classics have a future?
• Songs that aren't as cute as they initially seem.
• More WFMU dj picks for 2011.

THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER

Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Giftmas in Oldmanburg!

Jorma will be 71 tomorrow, Belew 62. More tomorrow, or not.

Have You Forgotten What We Were Like Then When We Were Still First Rate and the Day Came Fat with an Apple in Its Mouth

Please read this sentence from a New York Times article on how (boofuckinghoo) stressful a job Air Force drone pilots have:

A smaller but still significant number — including a quarter of Global Hawk sensor operators — had what the Air Force called “clinical distress,” which was defined as anxiety, depression or stress severe enough to affect an operator’s job performance or family life.

Consider that or, third word from end of sentence, why isn't it an and and what that might and not mean.

• More awful youtubes!
• Drone piloting is stressful!
• Drone piloting is stressful!
• Render, render.
• Natural Defecation Authorization.
• Lumpenproleprecariat.
• Dreading POTUS 12, the reality show.
• Folks closing up shop in Blegsylvania for Giftmas - links as I find them interesting, though probably fewer than normal. Also, the threatened blogroll reorg from a month ago hasn't been forgotten, might finally happen this weekend - I use the blogroll as bookmarks and want to make my cruising easier. No one will be purged, few will be moved - I mostly want to pull out those blogs that don't provide update feeds so I remember to look at them. As always, if you're Kinding me and me not you, let me know.
• Knowing things.
• Rashomon.
• Silliman's best books of poetry 2011.
• Rick Nielsen is 65 today:

ANIMALS

Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if your were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Giftmas in Frownland!

Yay! News from Frownland! A long-shelved Captain Beefheart album is set for release January 15, on what would have been the 70th birthday of the outre bandleader.

You Must Come to Them Sideways in Rooms Webbed in Shadow

I confess I like twitter. The spontaneity, here, before I forget, have. I can see why a Saudi prince invests $300M: why not make money off the dopes while they self-spy for you? I just thought about tweeting those three sentences, maybe my wit will drive up my followers count. Tell me, these women with pornstar names and California zen taglines who've never tweeted but have thousands of followers, why are they following me? I shouldn't bolster my esteem by their devotion, yes?

Planet needed a new phone so we went to the Corporate Store. She got a iPhone 4s, which means she can ask her phone what color is a carrot and get immediate and accurate response. I thought about getting myself (I'm due an upgrade) an antique iPhone 4 (that doesn't know a carrot's color) for half the price of the soon to be obsolete iPhone 4s but decided no, then thought, I wish I'd brought my new Kindle Fire so I could check my email.

• Links for a post about the web and the mind.
• Reflections on Occupy and social media.
• Graphic charts of crony capitalism.
• Suppression of the Left, union-style.
• Incoherence of the Left, the Right, the middle.
• Mass lunacy.
• Government, Enron-style.
• Fleet of wahmbulances.
• Obama and the GOP circus.
• Thomas Schaller is profoundly stupid. It may be a political opportunity for Obama; he will gauge his response with his standard amorality, nothing more or less.
• The Conservative comeback, part infinity.
• YFWP really hates Newt Gingrich. Speculate why.
• HRC again. I still think Obama will jettison Biden for Clinton in a nanosecond if he thinks he needs to.
• Rhetorical question.
• Notes from the underfoot.
• Things you might have missed.
• Born seventy-one years ago today. Happy Zappadan! There's tremendous Beefheart news for your daily Giftmas present later today - Zappa and Beefheart requests solicited, here and via email - I'll include them.

MIRRORS AT 4 a.m.

Charles Simic

You must come to them sideways

In rooms webbed in shadow,

Sneak a view of their emptiness

Without them catching

A glimpse of you in return.

The secret is,

Even the empty bed is a burden to them,

A pretense.

They are more themselves keeping

The company of a blank wall,

The company of time and eternity

Which, begging your pardon,

Cast no image

As they admire themselves in the mirror,

While you stand to the side

Pulling a hanky out

To wipe your brow surreptitiously.

Giftmas in Bloghoristan!

The complete electronic music of Iannis Xenakis. Here's Bohor part one, part two.

Here Is a Partial List of Artifacts: mirror, belt, half-finished 1040 form (married, filing jointly), mateless walkie-talkie, two blonde eyelashes, set of acrylic paints with all the red and yellow used up, buck knife, dog collar, camping tent (sleeps two), slivers of cut-up credit cards, ashtray in the shape of a naked woman, pen with teeth marks, bottom half of two-piece bathing suit, pill bottles containing unfinished courses of antibiotics, bank statements with the account number blacked out, maps of London, maps of Dubuque, sweatshirts with the mascots of colleges I didn't attend, flash cards for Spanish verbs (querer, perder, olvidar), Canadian pocket change, fork with two tines pushed together

I wrote today, I said last night at a Monday Night Thursday Night Pints, then paraphrased this: As for standard duh and daily suckagain: Obama signs into law detention infinity, it's not like power's torturing more, it's codifying what you knew they always did but pretended to imagine they didn't into what you expect them to do, which is what you expect to happen to you if you are disobedient (as it's expected you will be at America's serbianization), which is the motherfucking point of power. He is so reelected, said D. Yup, I said. K said, it's interesting watching the establishment go after Gingrich now. Do you think it's more animus or belief he can't win? L said, maybe the establishment worries Obama might lose and wants the most Obama-like to beat him? Yup, I said. Serbia? said D. I said, beyond routinizing as normal what we pretended not to know, we are also being told what, with the proper training and guidance, we will be not only permitted but encouraged to do. But not tomorrow, said K. Yes, said L, we have to be England first, right? Scotch is too fucking expensive for tasting like Nyqil, I said.

• Reflections on Occupy.
• Reflections on Occupy.
• Three months of Occupy.
• Six Occupy stories you may have missed.
• The End of the Beginning.
• Signs that Occupy is having an effect.
• Empires don't apologize.
• Le torrent.
• Cities under siege.
• History of humankind in six frames.
• Media consolidation.
• Imagine shutting down military bases.
• American client states.
• She Who Is as Shitty and Oink Thiessen hate on Gingrich.
• 1%ers behaving badly.
• Gods and monsters.
• The limits of credibility.
• Kim's death, to me, is more interesting to consider than....
• The Great Sun Jester.
• Which makes me a complicitopolitan!
• Outer Beltway. There will be no bridge over the Potomac between the current Beltway and Point of Rocks.
• Pastoralia as Necropastoral.
• Hot sex in St Francois County?
• What if Bach was one of us?
• What corporate radio looked like.
• The Weather: A Report on Sincerity.
• Warm and soothing.
• Jeebus, get well Ira Kaplan.

FORK WITH TWO TINES PUSHED TOGETHER

Nick Lantz

It's fast and cool as running water, the way we forget
the names of friends with whom we talked and talked
the long drives up and down the coast.

I say I love and I love and I love. However, the window
will not close. However, the hawk searches
for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded
nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.

Somewhere in Cleveland or Tempe, a pillow
still smells like M_____'s hair.
In a bus station, a child is staring
at L____'s rabbit tattoo. I've bartered everything
to keep from doing my soul's paperwork.

Here is a partial list of artifacts:
mirror, belt, half-finished 1040 form (married, filing jointly), mateless walkie-talkie, two blonde eyelashes, set of acrylic paints with all the red and yellow used up, buck knife, dog collar, camping tent (sleeps two), slivers of cut-up credit cards, ashtray in the shape of a naked woman, pen with teeth marks, bottom half of two-piece bathing suit, pill bottles containing unfinished courses of antibiotics, bank statements with the account number blacked out, maps of London, maps of Dubuque, sweatshirts with the mascots of colleges I didn't attend, flash cards for Spanish verbs (querer, perder, olvidar), Canadian pocket change, fork with two tines pushed together.

Forgetfulness means to be full
of forgetting, like a glass

overflowing with cool water, though I'd always
thought of it as the empty pocket

where the hand finds
nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.

One night, riding the train home from the city,
will I see a familiar face across from me? How many times
will I ask Is it you? before I realize
it's my own reflection in the window?

Giftmas in Complicitopolis!

Stream the new Guided by Voices? Yes, it's NPR. Of course I'm complicit.

However You Imagine or Care to Name That Machine We Hear Idling in the Engine Room at Night

Yesterday was simultaneously the busiest and slowest pingday of the year. Slowest because it's the Sunday before Giftmas, I had the fewest hits from regulars since Thanksgiving, busiest since Atrios linked to the blog five years ago because Blogbud Lambert was Sundaying naked capitalism's daily links and Kindly linked to my post on the first anniversary of Beefheart's death and KABOOM! Thanks much. I think some thought I was saying Beefheart had just died, my sincere apologies for my lack of clarity. The music was listened to, so all's good.

As for standard duh and daily suckagain: Obama signs into law detention infinity, it's not like power's torturing more, it's codifying what you knew they always did but pretended to imagine they didn't into what you expect them to do, which is what you expect to happen to you if you are disobedient (as it's expected you will be at America's serbianization), which is the motherfucking point of power.

• Bleakest era ever?
• The four occupations of Planet Earth.
• How business schools got like they are. There are times I wish I could write about where I work, cause the largest concentration of malevolent fucksticks I've ever encountered....
• Yes, you are responsible.
• UPDATE! The Newt you deserve.
• Dropping like flies.
• Dropping like flies.
• Stronger than yesterday.
• Art as occupation.
• Inside every comment is a blogpost.....
• Another Paulbot.
• Rightwing bloggers against Paul.
• On the (tangentially) above.
• Maureen McHugh? Good thing I have access to a university library's stacks.
• An invitation.
• Neil Halstead covers Kate Bush.
• Bill Nelson turned 63 yesterday:

APRIL 20

Campbell McGrath

Talking in class about rhetorical posture.
The students, several of whom are extravagantly
gifted, have been so deeply indoctrinated
with the depersonalizing jargon of critical theory
that they can barely accommodate the notion
of authorial agency, let alone the concept of a speaker.
Where is the speaker situated in this poem?
Not the speaker but the voice. Not the voice
but the self. Not the self but the locus of issuance.
How can I convince them that poems if texts
are human texts, that texts if artifacts
are artifacts forged in the furnace
of the heart, the soul, the psyche, however
you imagine or care to name that machine
we hear idling in the engine room at night.
Springlike today, near seventy, sunny and blue.
Budding trees no longer skeletal as logic.
The particular hickory or maple in the alley
whose sheaves of hairline branches engraved
discrete linear designs upon the iridescent sky
has swollen into generality, a fuzzy abstraction.
Another week should see the bloom-out
of purest, whisper-green shoots, darkening
all summer to fall.

When I Left Them a While Later I Noticed Their Ungloved Hands and Winter Made Me Selfish and Unsure

• On the above.
• I couldn't, though I could've if willing to piss off others in real life.
• Willing spirit, fading bodies.
• Bacevich says it's all downhill from here.
• On Graeber's *Debt.* 
• Zizek on Havel circa 1999.
• UPDATE! Havel and Zappa.
• The least surprising man in the world.
• The least surprising kabuki in the world.
• The least surprising pick in the world, made worse by the moron actually believing Congress isn't succeeding at what it's trying to do.
• Bachmann thinks she can be Romney's veep? I literally hadn't given a moment's thought to whom whichever cracker gets the nomination would name for veep, but of course, if Romney got the nomination he would name somebody crackerier to shore up the base.
• UPDATE! Motherfucking pwoggles.
• I'm not friends with but know and am friendly with this guy.
• The dopes at FAIR. 
• What is truth?
• What is life?
• @BLCKDGRD. I'll send you music.
• West Gaithersburg! And it's not Upper Moco since Gaithersburg is literally in the center of the county.
• John Allen's, Bodah's, and Bryce's 2011 lists.
• In preparation for Cage's centenary. Holyfuck.
• Brassneck.
• If not the prettiest song you hear today, a pretty song nonetheless.
• A song for the end.

Links first for this Special Holiday Bleggalgaze! Please, play along! Using the above links, or your own reiterators of your standard duh and daily suckagain, swap out the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc as it amuses you in this true story with your own!

Earlier today, the most intriguing athlete bio in the history of athlete bios made the rounds. Zung Nguyen, a 37-year old defenseman for a Boston-area men's hockey league, became an instant legend for this single sentence:

"PLAYER KICKED OUT OF LEAGUE FOR DEFECATING IN OPPONENT'S GLOVE FOLLOWING A FIGHT ON THE ICE." 

The "D" level is reportedly one of the more "goonish" leagues in the NESHL, and the 41-year-old Bermingham is described by a teammate as a "meathead" who's always looking to scrap. But because fighting is outlawed and grounds for immediate ejection, it's very rare to have an honest bare-knuckled fight. Nguyen, who had zero penalty minutes before this game, wasn't a fighter. A former teammate says he was never particularly crazy, and there are 50 other guys in the league he'd have pegged to pull something like this before Nguyen. Sometimes, you catch a guy on the wrong day.

Players on both sides say Bermingham won the fight clearly—"beat the crap out him," to use one's unfortunate phrase. Both players got unsportsmanlike conduct majors, and game misconducts; their nights were done. As they skated back to their respective locker rooms, a still-furious Nguyen hurled one of Bermingham's gloves over the glass into an empty section of seats.

Just after the second period began, Nguyen emerged from his locker room and went into the seats near where he had thrown Bermingham's glove. Teammates thought Nguyen was going to see his girlfriend, who had come to watch him play. Soon after, he went down to the corner of the arena, a semi-secluded area near where the Zamboni enters the ice. Young Guns players on the bench saw him squatting there, but didn't think anything of it at the time. He then returned the glove to its original spot in the seats.

Midway through the second period, Bermingham came out of his locker room. He had showered and changed and was ready to crack open a beer but needed to collect the last of his scattered equipment. Those gloves were nearly new: this was the second game he had worn them, and the price tag was still on. Bermie went into the seats where it had landed, picked it up, and put his hand in.

As always, fine metaphors abound.





ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT RESCUE

M.L. Smoker

And to think I had just paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk.
He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter,
arrived at 7 am to begin their work.
When I left them a while later I noticed their ungloved hands
and winter made me feel selfish and unsure.
This ground seems unsure of itself
      for its own reasons.
Real spring is still distant
and no one is trying to make themselves believe
this might last, this last unreasonable half hour.
It is six-thirty in eastern Montana and the cold
 has finally given way.
The time is important not because this has been a long winter
or for the fact that it is my first here
since childhood, but because there is so much else
to be unsure of.
         At a time like this
how is it that when I left only a week ago
there were three feet of snow on the ground,
and now there are none, not even a single patch
holding on in the shadow of the fence-line.
          We do not gauge enough of our lives
     by changes in temperature.
When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle.
It began with a death and I have tried to say it was unjust,
not because of the actual dying but because of what
was left.  What time of year was that?
I have still not yet learned to write of war.
I have friends who speak out--as is necessary--with subtle
and unsubtle force. But I am from
this place and a great deal has been going wrong 
         for some time now.
The two young Indian boys who might have drowned
last night in the fast-rising creek near school
are casualties enough for me.
          There have been too many
just like them and I have no way to fix these things.
A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week
about not have the intelligence
to take as subject for his poems
anything other than his own life.
For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood:
this poem was never supposed to mention
itself, other writers, or me.
          But I will not regret the boys who made it home,
or the cousins who used the money at the bar.
Still, something is being lost here and there are no lights
on this street; enough mud remains on our feet
to carry with us into the house.